Monday, February 22, 2010
Guest Blogger - Steph W.
Before we started reading Candide, we had learned that Voltaire ( the author of Candide) had written a play but was not clear enough for his readers so he wrote Candide with a very dramatic tone so he could get his point across. Throughout Candide's adventure, he makes many decisions and usually they end with complete disaster or mishap. Although Voltaire was optimistic, all of the choices Candide made ended up causing his fate. In someways I believe that Voltaire is contridicting himself in that he was optimistic but then finds himself writing about all the failures that came with Candide all the way from him getting 36 runs through the gauntlet for taking a walk out of free will, to killing the two women's lovers (monkey's) who he believed were attacking them. All of this misfurtune leads me to believe that Voltaire's point was not very clear to me but rather a book written out of sheer entertainment. Any opinions?
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I don't think Voltaire wrote this book just to entertain either himself or others. Your right though his point was very unclear. Voltaire did do a great job satirizing the optimistic and pessimistic philosophies, which i think was his main point. There is so much going on in Candide that it is hard to tell what his main goal reallywas. Voltaire's intention was to satirize everything but because he had such a broad target it was hard for him to make his point obvious.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, the main point of Candide was to not have a main point. I think that the goal of Candide was to put forth Voltaire's ideas of how people should live their lives and show what could happen if you were a "fool" and are similar one the people whom he makes fun of (the wealthy, a member of organized religion, an optimist). To me, his point was to have many different main objectives in this story and leave the reader's with a clearer understanding of his personal views on life and philosophy. My reasoning for coming to this conclusion is because Candide doesn’t have one specific theme that the reader is able to pin point and say the main theme is this____. There are numerous themes and all of them are based off of life lessons and how people should be living their lives.
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