Candide, 16-30: Boundary of Believability

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Voltaire has made two different kinds of characters in this book: those who go through understandable inconsistency in their way of thinking amidst the bizarre tragedies of the world, and Pangloss. Go figure that, in the chapter immediately following the reading on which I based my last blog post about Candide's heroic persistence, he began wavering. There are times when he denounces the idea of optimism and times when he tells people he still embraces Pangloss's teaching about the best of all possible worlds. He's pretty wishy-washy, for lack of a better term, but I kind of like this; Voltaire makes him seem much more human when we see utter despair cloud his thoughts after one event and then see him still clinging to the only thing he's ever been taught the next day. I can see real people acting in such a way, easily. ...And then we have Pangloss.

Pangloss's apparent immunity to recognize catastrophe was simply unbelievable. "I hold firmly to my original views. ... I am a philosopher after all." Candide in the first half of the book took bad things in stride, but at least he seemed to understand that syphilis and earthquakes and disembowelment were bad. Pangloss appears absolutely oblivious to everything, down to his own personal suffering. I understand the point of taking his ideology to the extreme, but there comes a point where I just think "Okay, nobody on earth ever actually thought like this. Who's Voltaire trying to make fun of?" A joke can only be told so many times before it loses its impact; as far as I'm concerned, the joke of Pangloss was forced a bit too much.

P.S. I commented on Darby and Olivia's posts. Don't know if I had to for this extra credit blog, but why not?

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