My Tragedy 

Description: A woman was having trouble with her marriage and she went to court where she eventually lost custody of her young son. Since she did not want to give him up she chose to commit suicide and kill her son too. She chose to murder her son rather than give him up. 

Description: The Baron is a very negative person. He always thought of the worst things that would happen than the positive things in the world. He never approved of anything regarding his sister and Candide.. He had the worst attitude throughout the book and there was nothing that could change his mind about how he viewed things and people. 

Description: Pococurante is a very wealthy man who is not pleased with anything around him. He is such a perfectionist that no one can meet his standards, not even himself. In this book, Voltaire shows that perfectionism leads to inactivity because of the impossibly high standards that Pococurante has amongst himself. Not even the paintings in his house are up to his standards. He is so negative and his perfectionism led him to be a pessimist because not even he can meet his standards. He is just full of disappointment.

Candide II (I Got A Little Passionate With This One :D)

In what ways does Voltaire’s satire extend beyond his own time? What would Voltaire think of our own age, for example? What aspects of our thought and behavior might he satirize most fiercely? What kinds of political, philosophical, and religious hypocrisy are most prevalent today? 

Voltaire was very ahead of his time. Though Candide was written during the Age of Enlightenment, something tells me that most people of his day just couldn't wrap their little heads around a few ideas in the book. All throughout the book, religion is a sick, twisted ball of lies and corruption. Every religious guy sucked. Except James the Anabaptist. He was cool. Why? Because no one back then liked Anabaptists. Whoa. What could this mean? Could Voltaire be a devil worshiper? A vessel of evil? Nope. He was simply showing that there is a definite disparity between religion’s professed roles, and its real role. And that the people who followed these religions are definitely stupid.

And what about all the death and suffering? Who in their right mind jokes about that? Someone who’s tired of listening to everyone go on and on about how things just couldn't happen any other way. It's destiny! It's fate! It's a load of crap. There were lots of Panglosses in Voltaire’s time, all spouting the same shallow, overly optimistic spiel of idiocy. “’Tis for the best” over here and “everything happens for a reason” over there. Well, all of that would be fine if it were rooted in any sort of logic or reality. But it’s not, so let the jokes flow.

Voltaire would have a field day with American politics. Blatant social injustice to the left, a comical lack of logic to the right, and basic intelligence in between; what more could a satirist ask for? So what kind of hypocrisy and outright stupidity would be included in Candide II? How about the argument about gay marriage? The Christians say that legalizing gay marriage would destroy the sanctity and purity of marriage as a whole (a.k.a. straight marriages)…yet, since May 2008, only nine civil unions pledged between gay couples were terminated, equaling only 1.1 percent of the 799 same-sex unions during that period, and at the same time, there were 8,711 traditional marriages and 6,965 divorces granted (The Canberra Times). Use whatever reasoning (or lack thereof) you want to explain it, but the dumbness shall be satirized. How about the fact that in 99.6% of all professions, men are still paid more than women. Or maybe how there was a “Meet and Greet” with George Zimmerman that had hundreds of idiots standing in line waiting to meet their hero. Oh, and the pay gap between professional athletes and the doctors that treat them? That’ll definitely have its own chapter. Without doubt, Candide II would be much thicker than its predecessor. There's a whole lot of dense people to make fun of.

The Price We Pay For The Sugar You Eat

Immediately upon leaving Eldorado, Candide and Cacambo encounter a slave who has had a leg and a hand cut off. He tells them, “It is the price we pay for the sugar you eat in Europe” (p. 52). What relationship is Voltaire suggesting here between happiness and suffering, between the best of all possible worlds and the worst of all possible worlds? How might Voltaire make this point if he were writing today? 

Happiness and suffering: two polar opposites that appear to work hand in hand in the world of Candide. The best of all possible worlds is relative; it has to be compared to some lesser world by whomever declares it to be the best. For every “best” world there has to be a “worst”. They coincide, and when Candide and Pangloss, men from the “best” world, enter the “worst” world, they have a little trouble adjusting their all-encompassing idea that all of the world is the best of possible worlds. They were not exposed to suffering, they were not exposed to wanting. They had to discover the fact that there is no best world without the suffering of the worst world.

If Voltaire were to make this parallel today, he could easily make it in the unbridgeable gap between the well-to-do and the peasants in this “fine” country we live in. America can seem like the best of all possible worlds to the few who can afford to live it up, but to the other 99%, it’s the worst.

Disscussion Questions

1. Candide is sustained throughout his many ordeals by the hope of being reunited with Cunégonde. But when he does at last find her, she has become ugly and ill-tempered. What is Voltaire suggesting about the exaltation of romantic love? 

Voltaire can suggest many things about love through the relationship of Candide and Cunegonde. Love is a very strong bond that can get people through pretty much anything when it is true love or so I heard. However, maybe he was suggesting that love grows old. Love got Candide through his travels, he can’t give up all of his time and effort because she’s ugly now. If the love one had for each other was real, then one can see past the ugly. People will change throughout their lives, and sometimes love can push past any change that occurs. At the end of the novel, Candide kept true to his word, and married Cunegonde.

2. At the end of the novel, Martin says, “Let us set to work and stop proving things, for that is the only way to make life bearable” (p. 93), echoing the Turkish farmer who says, “our work keeps at bay the three great evils: boredom, vice, and necessity” (p. 92). Do you think Voltaire is endorsing this view? Why would doing physical work be preferable to the life of a philosopher? 

                I believe that Voltaire was telling us that the options one has in their life will be up to them in the end. One can live life in endless pain, but can be happy. Toward the end of the novel, Candide was surrounded around the people that mean the most to him and taught him the most, but he wasn’t happy. To do physical work for life is like a Buddhist view on life, which is different than how Candide started in this book. For the life of a philosopher, this life can be the way they choose. It’s a simple life that give them apple time to think upon topic that drives their curiosity. So, I don’t believe he was endorsing this view, but more of suggesting it. 

1. Near the end of the book, while Pangloss was “being hanged, and dissected, and beaten, and made to row in a galley,” he still holds firm to his original views that this is the best of all possible worlds. “I am a philosopher after all. It would not do for me to recant” (p. 88). What are the dangers in holding beliefs that are impermeable to reality, that do not alter according to actual experience? 

8. It is very dangerous to keep the same ignorant beliefs after horrible experiences happen because usually those experiences contradict the beliefs. If you keep the same beliefs you probably didn’t learn anything from the experience so you will remain ignorant. Remaining ignorant is one of the worst things that you could do.