Candide Analysis

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Candide Study Questions Candide is driven away from the baron’s castle because the baron caught Candide kissing his daughter’s hand. Candide is the love child of Lady Baroness and a man whom she would not marry because he wasn’t of high nobility. Voltaire is satirizing the differences in social classes at that time period and how important being noble and wealthy was. Candide finds Cuné gonde so attractive because “he thought Miss Cuné gonde excessively handsome though he had never had the courage to tell her so.” (Voltaire 12). Because nobility was such a high issue at that time, Candide’s forbidden kiss was almost like Adam and Eve’s disobedience in partaking of the fruit in the Garden of Eden. Candide and Adam and Eve were all kicked out of their peaceful homes to endure what trouble lie in the outside world. Voltaire’s usage of a biblical allusion means that more allusions appear in the story, such as when Pangloss and Candide began a conversation about “original sin” with an Inquisitor (Voltaire 27) and the psalm invoking God’s mercy being sung as Candide was being whipped by the Inquisition (Voltaire 35). Cuné gonde represents the difference between reality and imagination, because throughout his journeys, Candide still sees a beautiful young innocent woman, but the trials that befall on Cuné gonde ruin her beauty and innocence, making her unable to live up to Candide’s expectations. Voltaire describes castles and barons in the first chapter of the story, setting the stage for Candide’s tale to begin. The description of the castle life is symbolic to the innocence and happiness one may have before experiencing trials and hardships like Candide would. The ignorance of the people within the castle of difficulties, along with Pangloss’s metaphysico-theology-cosmolonigology, which states that “there is no effect without a cause”, make life in the castle
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