Changing For The Best

An interesting gradual change we see in Candide is how his perception about the idea that “all is for the better” is completely transformed. As I have talked about in previous posts, Candide had been supportive and obstinate about Pangloss’ teachings even when living hard moments. In Chapters 18 and 19, we see clear examples of Candide’s disappointments about these teachings. As Candide encounters the slave who is missing a hand and a leg in Surinam, he says as if speaking to Pangloss: “A scandal like this never occurred to you! But it’s the truth, and I shall have to renounce that optimism of yours in the end” (86). This answers one of the big questions I have had in my mind. Voltaire is definitely showing a big change in Candide’s belief system, due to all the suffering he has lived and witnessed, in order to convince the reader how illogical it is to live thinking that “all is for the better”. Voltaire is belittling the idea of not having free will, he is trying to show that due to the atrocities we see it is impossible that they are happening in a predetermined fashion. His descriptions describe the idea of fate as gruesome and cruel.

Candide is also able to reach new conclusions about his daily adventures, as how he reacts to the loss of the majority of sheep that were carrying his new treasures back to Europe. He reflects on “how perishable are the riches of this world. There is nothing solid but virtue” (85). This is an interesting reaction to the great loss he has just experienced. This is a technique used by Voltaire in order to make the reader confident that Candide’s process of transformation is beginning. We now see Candide as an individual who is gradually realizing that maybe it isn’t true that “all is for the better”, but that our actions, which are chosen by us produce the ability to open new paths and options for us. Our actions determine our lives and not fate.

In the New York Times article Best of All Possible Worlds, Updated for the Paris Stage, I read some of the history Candide has as a world musical, and the way directors work out Voltaire’s satire. I find it interesting how the modern musical takes place in 1950’s America, and how it makes fun of the modern ideas and situations instead of recurring to the specific story Voltaire once wrote. Changing the Auto-da-fé in Portugal into an appearance with the Ku Klux Klan torch carriers and sailing from France to New York instead than from Spain to Argentina there are differences that change the setting but don’t alter the general objective of comparing fate to free will. One could argue, for the sake of being provocative that the fated part of life is the array of choices offered to an individual via genetics, family, historical moment, race, sex, social standing, physical abilities or ailments, etc. and that free will would be what you do with the specific set of limitations or favorable circumstances that each one of us is born into. Our real power would be in exercising our free will to transform that which was unfavorable into amazing, such as Helen Keller, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Gandhi or Abraham Lincoln did with their fated circumstances.