This essay examines Voltaire's titular character Candide as simultaneously a comic fool and a slowly developing hero. It argues that Candide begins the novel as a credulous, passive figure wholly captured by his tutor Pangloss's doctrine that "everything is for the best," yet gradually—through an accumulation of suffering, betrayal, and disillusionment—grows into a figure capable of rejecting that complacent optimism. The essay traces this transformation across key episodes in the novel, from Candide's expulsion from the Baron's castle through his globe-trotting misadventures to his final embrace of practical labor on a small farm outside Constantinople. Drawing on the Norton Anthology edition and SparkNotes character analysis, the paper concludes that Candide achieves genuine heroism only when he leads his companions away from abstract dogma and toward a simple, cultivated life.
The comic novel Candide, by eighteenth-century French author François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, satirically attacks the pseudo-rationalist idea that human optimism alone — the actual subtitle of the book is Candide, or Optimism — can counteract extremes of evil and cruelty, such as those continually endured by the novel's title character and his various companions: Cunégonde, Pangloss, Cunégonde's brother, the old woman, Cacambo, Martin, and others. Throughout most of the novel, Candide seems a hapless fool for continuing to cling, in the face of much contrary evidence, to his tutor Pangloss's original worldview: that "everything is for the best" (p. 521). However, Candide also later grows into a hero of sorts — brave, tenacious, and resilient. Ultimately, he saves friends from cruel fates. Still, for most of the story before that point, we simultaneously pity him and laugh at him. Only at the end, when Candide both disbelieves and leads his peers away from Pangloss's dogma — having learned, both metaphorically and literally, that to achieve real contentment and fulfillment "we must cultivate our garden" (p. 580) — does Candide emerge as more hero than fool.
At the beginning of the novel especially, the title character seems "bland, naive, and highly susceptible to the influence of stronger characters. Like the other characters, Candide is less a realistic individual than the embodiment of a particular idea or folly that Voltaire wishes to illustrate" ("Analysis of Major Characters: Candide"). However, Candide's late-developing heroism derives from his ability not only to learn, but to teach others, and also from his courage to begin again based on experience rather than dogma. To arrive at that point, however, a hero — or at least this hero — must first endure enough suffering to wish to challenge beliefs adopted very early in life. As a hero, Candide must first admit his own disillusionment with Pangloss's philosophy and then begin anew, drawing on wisdom gathered from painful firsthand experience. In other words, Candide must learn to fight the complacency that makes unbridled optimism seductive, yet dangerous.
As Lawall and Mack suggest, "The real problem, Candide suggests, is not natural or human disaster so much as human complacency" ("François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire 1694–1778," p. 518). As Voltaire implies throughout Candide, simplistic, quasi-rational thinking — as exemplified by absurd declarations such as Pangloss's claim that "noses were made to support spectacles, hence we have spectacles" (p. 521) — is not enough to counteract the real damage human beings characteristically inflict on one another. Before Candide is expelled from the Baron's castle, Pangloss continually tells him "everything is for the best" (p. 521), and throughout most of the story Candide still believes it, even as events themselves starkly and vividly illustrate the opposite.
In Pangloss's own case, even his debilitating case of syphilis, from which he is dying, is described as "an indispensable part of the best of worlds, a necessary ingredient . . ." (p. 526). With its piling-up of hideous and usually entirely avoidable human misfortunes — the Lisbon earthquake being a notable exception — the story systematically disproves Pangloss's insistent view that "things cannot be otherwise than they are, for since everything is made to serve an end, everything necessarily serves the best end" (p. 521).
In the topsy-turvy world inhabited by Candide and his friends, almost nothing is, in fact, either as it morally should be or as it superficially appears to be. The old woman whom Candide and Cunégonde meet along the way — and who tells them her story in Chapters 11 and 12 — turns out to be "the daughter of Pope Urban the Tenth" (p. 535). Later, Candide, still sincerely in love, asks Don Fernando, the Governor of Buenos Aires, to marry him and Cunégonde. Instead, Cunégonde, at the old woman's coaxing, is easily persuaded to marry Don Fernando, who is described by the old woman as "the greatest lord in South America, who has a really handsome moustache" (p. 540).
By Chapter 19, in which Candide and his friend Cacambo arrive in Surinam and also meet Martin, Candide begins to view optimism as nothing but "a mania for saying things are well when one is in hell" (p. 552). This moment marks a crucial shift in Candide's consciousness: the doctrine he has clung to through beatings, wars, earthquakes, and betrayals at last loses its hold on him.
"Candide rejects optimism as a lie"
"Reunions and the move to communal farm life"
Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de. "Candide, or Optimism." The Norton Anthology of World Literature: 1650 to the Present, Vol. D (Pkg. 2). New York: Norton and Company, 2002. 520–580.
"Analysis of Major Characters: Candide." SparkNotes. Retrieved July 9, 2005, from
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