Candide One Can Look at

Candide One can look at Candide by Voltaire as a simple story about a man and his associates who stumble through life with tragic mishap after mishap. or, on another level, one can see it as Voltaire's satire on life and how an optimistic person copes with the negative realities of life. It is this second approach where the topic of Candide's garden comment at the end of the play becomes noteworthy.

This is a tale about the good-natured but unfortunate Candide as he travels the world struggling to be reunited with his love, Lady Cunegonde. His tutor, Dr. Pangloss, retains his good cheer despite facing increasingly more misfortune and they continually come across horrible cruelty and suffering. Candide finally finds Cunegonde, who has become ugly, slovenly and eventually miserable as well. All the characters have now become disillusioned with life. Based on their experiences, Candide and Pangloss conclude that man was born to labor productively.

All of them then work on the farm, cook, embroider, build, and bring in the crops. Pangloss observes that all the events leading to farming prove that this is perhaps the best of all possible worlds after all.

Candide responds, "We need to cultivate our garden." Is the final remark meant as a call to social action? or, is the ending intended to suggest a kind of fatalism, a defensive self-protection where the little group shuts out all concerns of outside society in escape? This should not be seen as a negative ending, where a person just ends up escaping and coping with what life has to offer.

As said by one of the characters: "I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life." Rather, work has to be recognized in a positive light. As noted by the Turkish farmer to Candide, Martin and Pangloss: Work banishes the three great evils of boredom, vice, and poverty. With hope, it also will help eliminate some of the cruelty and evil in the world, if people are working together toward a common cause.

Pangloss agrees that work is a part of the necessary, benevolent scheme of things. Such action, too, needs to be productively meaningful, not just a way of killing time. The group does not end up at a house or on the road or at a castle but in a garden, at work where new seeds can grow, yield produce and perhaps enhance the quality of life.

As members of a small group of individuals away from the world's corruption, they can each have a personal task as well as set and reach goals together. This, after all, is what society is: A group of individuals with similar values and beliefs that are working for the common good. The object is to try and destroy the weeds that will do their best to choke and eat away at the seedlings, so the plants can grow and provide food, shelter, clothing and other necessities.

Despite the horrors that all of them have seen and individually faced, they know that boredom, doing nothing, is a worst fate of all. The woman asks rhetorically if it is worse to be raped scores of times by pirates, have a buttock cut off, run the from the Bulgarians, and be flogged and hanged in the galleys -- that is, to go through all these horrors they have experienced -- or stay where they were and do nothing? The new gardeners.