Saturday, February 05, 2005

Candide 20 - end

After reading the whole book, I really liked it, but there's almost too much to comment on. I thought this passage on page 140 kind of summed up the whole novel in a way:
"I should like to know which is the worst, to be ravished a hundred times by negro pirates, to have one buttock cut off, to run the gauntlet of a Bulgar regiment, to be whipped and hanged at an auto-da-fe, to be dissected, to row in the galleys - in fact, to experience all the miseries through which we have passed - or just to stay here with nothing to do?"
I just thought it was interesting that they were questioning whether it was all worth it just to end up on a farm with little more than they started out with and just tend to the garden. I also loved that Pangloss came back finally and that he was still saying that everything was going to turn out okay, even though he hardly believed it himself anymore.
Voltaire definitely had a lot of social commentary going on in the last parts of the book too, but I thought the part that stood out the most in my mind was the fact that once Candide found out that Cunegonde was ugly now, he didn't even want to marry her anymore but was doing so just to spite her brother. I think there was a lot of tongue-and-cheek commentary going on in this last section. There was so much going on in the last ten chapters of this book, so I'm interested to see what everyone else has to say about it.

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