Candide is characterised by its sarcastic tone, as well as by its erratic, fantastical and fast-moving plot. A picaresque novel with a story similar to that of a more serious bildungsroman, it parodies many adventure and romance clichés, the struggles of which are caricatured in a tone that is mordantly matter-of-fact. Still, the events discussed are often based on historical happenings, such as the Seven Years' War and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. As philosophers of Voltaire's day contended with the problem of evil, so too does Candide in this short novel, albeit more directly and humorously. Voltaire ridicules religion, theologians, governments, armies, philosophies, and philosophers through allegory; most conspicuously, he assaults Leibniz and his optimism. Voltaire's men and women point his case against optimism by starting high and falling low. A modern could not go about it after this fashion. He would not plunge his people into an unfamiliar misery. He would just keep them in the misery they were born to. But such an account of Voltaire's procedure is as misleading as the plaster cast of a dance. Look at his procedure again. Mademoiselle Cunégonde, the illustrious Westphalian, sprung from a family that could prove seventy-one quarterings, descends and descends until we find her earning her keep by washing dishes in the Propontis. The aged faithful attendant, victim of a hundred acts of rape by negro pirates, remembers that she is the daughter of a pope, and that in honor of her approaching marriage with a Prince of Massa-Carrara all Italy wrote sonnets of which not one was passable. We do not need to know French literature before Voltaire in order to feel, although the lurking parody may escape us, that he is poking fun at us and at himself. His laughter at his own methods grows more unmistakable at the last, when he caricatures them by casually assembling six fallen monarchs in an inn at Venice. A modern assailant of optimism would arm himself with social pity. There is no social pity in "Candide." Voltaire, whose light touch on familiar institutions opens them and reveals their absurdity, likes to remind us that the slaughter and pillage and murder which Candide witnessed among the Bulgarians was perfectly regular, having been conducted according to the laws and usages of war. Had Voltaire lived today he would have done to poverty what he did to war. Pitying the poor, he would have shown us poverty as a ridiculous anachronism, and both the ridicule and the pity would have expressed his indignation.
Candide
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100 Meisterwerke der Weltliteratur - Klassiker die man kennen muss
Franz Kafka, Fjodor Michailowitsch Dostojewski, Rumi, Platon, Tacitus, Homer, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, Alfred Adler, Marcus Aurelius, Arthur Schopenhauer, Walt Whitman, Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Karl May, Alexandre Dumas, James Fenimore Cooper, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, O.Henry, Stefan Zweig, Charles Dickens, Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Joseph von Eichendorff, Klaus Mann, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Else Lasker-Schüler, Heinrich Heine, Herman Melville, Iwan Sergejewitsch Turgenew, Gustav Freytag, Thomas Wolfe, Jonathan Swift, Walter Scott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Gustave Flaubert, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Galsworthy, Iwan Alexandrowitsch Gontscharow, Oscar Wilde, Lew Wallace, Voltaire, Lewis Carroll, Johanna Spyri, Mark Twain, Selma Lagerlöf, Rudyard Kipling, Jules Verne, Jack London, Miguel de Cervantes, Honoré De Balzac, Emile Zola, Guy De Maupassant, Moliere, Theodor Fontane, Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoi, Anton Pawlowitsch Tschechow, Dante Alighieri, Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, E. T. Hoffmann, Heinrich Mann, Kurt Tucholsky, Heinrich von Kleist, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Gottfried Keller, Sophie von La Roche, Theodor Storm, William Shakespeare
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