A Mature Side of Candide

This is perhaps the couple of chapters with most irony I’ve read in my entire life. I mean not even those comedy movies can compete against it. When the University of Coimbra states that to prevent any more earthquakes, 4 people should be burnt alive in a ceremonial matter. Those four people include Pangloss and Candide. Candide miraculously gets out alive, however Pangloss is hanged… 2 days later another earthquake occurs. Irony? Neh, not at all.

“Pangloss and Candide were led off separately and closeted in exceedingly cool rooms, where they suffered no inconvenience from the sun…”(pg.36). These exceedingly cool rooms were actually prison cells and where they were going to keep them until their sacrifice. Doesn’t seem so exceedingly cool anymore, do they? I don’t really know if Voltaire’s irony gets me mad or not. I mean, the fact that he is not even trying to trick us, that it’s just his style, is what bothers me: That I fall every time and have to read it over and that’s when I get it.

I got to see another part of Candide as well, I didn’t see him as that naïve and kind of dumb person I had seen in the beginning and who I criticized on my first blog, no, I got to see him as a normal person with feelings. Someone who has faced a lot of misfortune and after being strong for so long he is about to break down. “If this is the best of all possible worlds, […] what can the rest be like? […] But when it comes to my dear Pangloss being hanged-the greatest of philosophers- I must know the reason why. And was it part of the scheme of things that my dear Anabaptist (The best of men!) Should be drowned in sight of land? And lady Cunégonde, that pearl amongst women! Was it really necessary for her to be disemboweled?” (Pg. 37) I completely sympathized with Candide in this part. I actually saw a part of me there. Sometimes, humans have to stay strong and build courage from places they don’t have against an adversity but there just comes a point where its just impossible to keep on acting like if everything was right and that’s when we break down. That’s exactly what happened to Candide, he tried to accept all this calamities with help of Pangloss, because “that’s how things were supposed to happen”, but he got to the point where he needed answers, just like any other person.

Oh, and by the way, for those of you reading the book, auto-da-Fé means act of faith in Portuguese. It was a public ceremony typical of the Spanish inquisition where religious leaders punished the heretics, protestants, Muslim, or Jewish. Thought you should know!