Candide Essay

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Candide Essay Hunter Kuhn 9/30/11 Metz, 3 Voltaire once said, “Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.” Based on the story of Candide every person must have a hundred counts because of their terrible nature. Through Voltaire’s eyes, 18th century Europe was a place where the devil himself could fit in. This hell on earth was what Voltaire’s Candide lived through and fought against. Candide tussled with many tragedies, until the horrendous acts of his fellow man broke his spirit and belief in optimism. Yet Voltaire was not the only European author to feel this way about the true nature of man. It would be two centuries later; that a British writer named William Golding wrote his famous chronicle entitled The Lord of the Flies. In this book, children ages ranged from as young as 6 to 12 years old, but nevertheless they were just as morally corrupt as the scoundrels that Voltaire accounted in his novel Candide. Despite the time gap in which these prolific creators of literature lived, their views of life and human society were as identical as twins. The struggle between good and evil is an involuntary inner conflict we must all endure but as you will read, Voltaire and William Golding wrote to a different tune of what we all believe about human morals and intuition. As a result of the suffering endured by Candide he lost his faith and found the true colors of man. But in The Lord of the Flies a different plot to discover the impurities of man was exploited. By virtue of a plane carrying children being shot down by the Nazi military in the war torn decade that was the 1940’s, we encounter how human beings react where there are no consequences for their actions. The setting for this test of human moral and virtues takes place... Kuhn, 2 on a vacant tropical island in the deserted Atlantic Ocean. As the reader we discover that even these
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