Conclusion Of The Thousand Miseries

In the character of the old woman in Candide, we find an individual who has developed an understanding of life, and gained a certain moral authority on other people’s lives, through her misery. The hardships the old woman lived became the reason for Candide and Cunégonde to trust and follow her advice. The old woman is also an interesting character for the way she feels about life. Even though she vividly describes the horrible tortures and events that have happened in her life, she is still fond of life. She states that she has wanted “to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life” (57). The strong pull life has on our souls, our desire to live makes it easier for one to continue fighting, to not surrender under the burden of misery. Can we truly give up the only thing we were all generously gifted and that we will all have to eventually surrender any moment, like it or not? There is still this necessity to grip life harder and strive for our goals, for a better present that is yet to come.

The old woman gives the author a voice by which he criticizes people who live thinking that all is for the better in a rather different way as he has done so far in the book. Through the events that happen in Cunégonde’s and Candide’s life we are clearly shown the horrible and unjust events that can happen in any individual’s life, but through the voice of the old woman, we are shown the direct message Voltaire has wanted to carry throughout the whole novel. She says to Cunégonde and Candide as they are in the boat going to Buenos Aires that if you “persuade each passenger to tell you his story, and if you find even one who has not often cursed his life and told himself that he is the most miserable man alive, you can throw me into the sea head first” (57). It isn’t how horrible life has been for us, what unites us is the way we react to all the horrible moments of life. Finally what unites us is the thought that we are the unluckiest, the most miserable. What hope is there then in the boat of humanity, the boat of the “most miserable”? We are shown an ugly truth of our behavior as a community, the thought that we are all obsessed with our own little fate with absolutely no conscious awareness of the need to help our fellow inmates on the planet, instead we constantly compare and measure our drama with theirs. This division, this distance between me and you, and us and them, is the beginning of all our problems, all our wars. It is no longer a question of whether all is for the better, it’s more like if we continue to be so self absorbed and unconscious, it all inevitably will become the worse for all of us.

Another interesting approach the old woman gives us, relates to the way we, as individuals, work out how to keep on living after the complex situations we have had to overcome. She asks us why “be eager to grow on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away” (57). This gives us the needed insight to conclude that Voltaire uses this character to make us open up to the possibility that what we all truly need as individuals is a way to share ourselves, to let our spirits say whatever they need, to continue living, to unload and share our burdens to start a true healing process. I noticed that in this question, the old woman poses how our hearts are the victims of the repressed sentiments we have always wanted to say, the yelling that has been kept someplace in our hearts ready to be freed. The heart of a suffering individual is waiting for the serpent of secrets to be killed, before it eats the heart, the true life force, completely.