Candide: Exploration of Voltaire's Viewpoints about Enlightenment

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Representation of Age of the Enlightenment
Voltaire’s work, ‘Candide’ both supports and criticizes the various conventional enlightenment viewpoints. The author heavily relies on fictional non-western perspectives to ensure that her arguments are clear and understood by her readers. In her work, Voltaire contradicts with the conventional Enlightenment belief which positions man I at the center stage of his destiny by claiming that he is good naturally. Therefore, the author presents ideas that mock this ideology. One aspect about Voltaire is that she uses Candide as a platform to expose the hardships that the main character, Candide, encounters which are as a result of man’s cruelty and other natural phenomenon that he cannot control. Such cruelty is evident in events like the war between Bulgars and Abares, Cunegonde’s rape and the Lisbon earthquake. Such insights into his book reveal that his book is dominated by satire which he uses to mock the Indology of Enlightenment. In this paper a close examination of the characterization and the various themes developed through the characters in Voltaire’s work, Candide, are used to explore Voltaire’s viewpoints about enlightenment.
Primarily, Candide focuses on exposing the falsehoods in the ideology of enlightenment. He reveals that he does not believe in God’s existence. Throughout his work of Candide, Voltaire makes fun of philosophers that hold onto the idea that God exists and a transformation can occur to make the world a good place in its entirety. His complaint is evident when he argues that the philosophers talk much but do nothing and solve none of the problems that they identify in their research. In his persistence mockery of Enlightenment, Voltaire confirms that the notion of aristocracy harbored in the superiority by birth in enlightenment is a mockery.
Characterization in Developing Enlightenment Viewpoints
The work’s main character is Candide. She has the same name as the title of the novel. Voltaire describes Candide as one of the most unsettled individuals in his work by calling him a wanderer. The events in the life of Candide are an absolute depiction of the mockery he harbors about enlightenment. Despite being taught by Dr. Pangloss that everything that happened in man’s life was for the best, it is unfortunate that his love for Cunegonde, Baron’s daughter did not confirm this ideology. He was exiled for declaring his love for Cunegonde and it is at this point that he turned into a wanderer travelling from one place to another. One contradiction about his love for Cunegonde was that; Baron was his mother’s bother which meant that Candid had fallen in love with her cousin. Despite harboring the thought that everything that happened in his life was the best and had a reason as taught by one of the greatest philosophers in the text, Dr. Pangloss, everyone else dismissed the theory.
A close examination at his name, Candide, means optimism. Therefore, he stayed optimistic getting back her love, Cunegonde. Dr. Pangloss decides to walk the journey of suffering and one that was marked by a ...