candide

A detailed Summary of candide

In the story Candide by Voltaire, black comedy is used so much that the reader has no feelings for the tragedies by the end of the story. It seems that every chapter has its own great disaster that is far greater than the chapter before. This makes the reader lose the shock value and takes the reader out of the story because Candide is more of a cartoon than a person.

We see our first glimpse of black comedy in chapter 3. Candide has been court marshaled and is about to receive punishment. The punishment is that Candide is to be flogged thirty-six times. At first the reader is shocked about how many times he is going to get flogged, but then Voltaire throws in that he is to be flogged by two thousand individuals. The black comedy presented here takes the reader out of Candide's shoes and puts him into a cartoon role. No individual can withstand that kind of punishment and still live. This chapter is just a peek of how much black comedy is used in this story.

It does not take long for black comedy to show up again in the story. In Chapter 4, the reader is reintroduced to Candide's tutor. Doctor Pangloss is described as:

"He met a beggar who was covered with pustules, his eyes were sunken, the end of h

If this were a living person he would have been dead a long time ago, not sitting in the street. Again this pulls the reader out of the story and slaps the story into a cartoon. I feel this is a problem for the reader. Every time you try to relate the story to human life, Voltaire goes to the extreme and puts his characters into a non-believable form.

As the story progresses, the black comedy gets thicker and thicker. Instead of using human suffering and pain, Voltaire decides to use natural forces. Voltaire makes it so that Candide goes through a shipwreck and then an earthquake in a matter of days. This could happen in real life, but it seems so absurd, that you can only laugh at the possibility that it could happen. By chapter five, the story is so unbelievable that you are not affected by any tragedies for the rest of the play.

You can not help but wonder how a person can go through all this and still have the energy to argue over who has it worse. We then find out the old women has it worse then Cunegonde. You get a feeling of this even before she tells us by the first sentence. "My eyes were not always bloodshot and red-rimmed, my nose did not always touch my chin, and I was not born a servant" By this time in the story, the reader is so numb, that nothing can shock you. The old women goes on to tell us that she got married to a prince, and he died within two hours of their marriage. Next she goes on a voyage and gets taken over by pirates, where the pirates decide they need to cavity search them. They then stripped them naked and then the captain rapes the old woman. It's not over for the old women though, she then watches as her mom and others get pulled apart by men who wanted them. This black comedy is so unbelievable that once again the reader has

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1208
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English