Tone and Theme in Voltaire’s Candide
The tone of Voltaire’s highly regarded work is humorously hopeless. The tone is humorous because Candide and his fellow characters cling to the idea, set forth by the philosopher Pangloss, that everything is for the best. This blind optimism is negated time after time through the misfortunes that Candide and the rest of the story’s characters experience, yet the characters press on with their hopelessly positive attitudes throughout their lives. When confronted with the bleak realities of the horrors of life by a scholar, Candide only replies, “I’ve seen worse, but a wise man, who later had the misfortune to be hanged, taught me that such things are exactly as they should be: they’re the shadows in a beautiful picture.” This tone is achieved by the horrific events that the characters of Candide endure and their disinclination to accept the idea that, maybe, they really are doomed, and not all is actually for the best. The reader is inclined to give up on hope long before any of the characters do.
For example, Candide loses his beloved Pangloss and the kind Anabaptist on his journey to the utopian Eldorado, gets beaten and whipped, kills more than one person (including his beloved Cunegonde’s brother the Baron), and suffers numerous other misfortunes, while still concluding that all is still for the best because he can still find Cunegonde. After Pangloss is hanged, dissected, beaten, and made to row in a galley, he still believes that everything is for the best. Candide asks him, “Tell me, dear Pangloss, …did you still think that everything was for the best in this world?” And Pangloss replies, “I still hold my original opinions”. He goes on to say that his reasoning is due to the fact that he is a philosopher and it would be wrong to take back what he had said. Also, at the end of the novel, Candide, Cunegonde, Pangloss, and the Old Woman all decide that they are well-off where they are and that they may as well tend their garden, disregarding every horrible thing that they have had to experience in their pasts. Pangloss portrayed this best when he said to Candide at the end, “All events are inter-connected in this best of all possible worlds, for if you hadn’t been driven from a beautiful castle with hard kicks in the behind because of your love for Lady Cunegonde, if you hadn’t been seized by the Inquisition, if you hadn’t wandered over America on foot, if you hadn’t thrust your sword through the baron, and if you hadn’t lost all your sheep from the land of Eldorado, you wouldn’t be here eating candied citrons and pistachio nuts.” This final note of proof of their perpetual optimism is consistent with the tone; Cunegonde is ugly, the Old Woman is disagreeable, and none of the characters are very happy, yet they all continue to busy themselves with something to do and continue being hopeful. “The whole group entered into this commendable plan, and each began to exercise his own talents.”
The theme of Candide is that life is utterly unfair and will continue to give everyone a rough time despite a person’s attitude of hope or a faith in everything being for the best. This prominent theme is shown over and over again as Candide and his companions suffer innumerable misfortunes and tragedies even through the existence of their collectively strong belief that everything will turn out for the best. Each character is traumatized and miserable most of the time. Some are even thought to be dead several times. By the end of the novel, the reader is almost in awe that Candide and the others have not given up on life entirely. The reader ultimately sees that it is hopeless to think that things will turn out well for the characters. However, it is also impossible to believe that they will not continue to live, learn, and try to be happy nonetheless.
Candide, with its humorously hopeless tone and its theme that life is continuously unfair, relates to the modern reader in a remarkably timeless way. This novel is relevant to today’s world because Pangloss’ philosophy is still widely accepted among people now. Many people believe, with everything inside of them, that everything is for the best. The optimism displayed in Candide is a universal emotion that is not limited to one era or one generation. Through today’s use of religion, self-help materials, support groups, and countless other measures, modern people perpetuate the seemingly hopeless concept of optimism that is portrayed in Voltaire’s classic. Though some of the events that happen to Candide could never actually occur today, many people have suffered some caliber of trauma in their own lives and will continue to believe that their lives are guided by fate or that they will end up happier because of it nevertheless.
Overall, the humorously hopeless tone of the novel brings the reader into the plot of the story. The theme that life is and will always be terribly unfair is easily identified with by most readers. All of the unbelievably tragic events that happen to the characters of Candide seem to lead to the conclusion that Candide and his friends would give up their hopeless philosophy, but they do not. Instead, they choose to continue to believe in their notion that all is for the best and that they live in the best of all possible worlds. Readers can enjoy this bit of humor and draw a parallel to this philosophy within their own lives. In this way, all generations can understand and respond to the classic that is Candide.
