Candide Essay, Research Paper

In the story Candide by Voltaire, black comedy is used so much that the reader has no feelings for the tragedies by the end of the story. It seems that every chapter has its own great disaster that is far greater than the chapter before. This makes the reader lose the shock value and takes the reader out of the story because Candide is more of a cartoon than a person.

We see our first glimpse of black comedy in chapter 3. Candide has been court marshaled and is about to receive punishment. The punishment is that Candide is to be flogged thirty-six times. At first the reader is shocked about how many times he is going to get flogged, but then Voltaire throws in that he is to be flogged by two thousand individuals. The black comedy presented here takes the reader out of Candide s shoes and puts him into a cartoon role. No individual can withstand that kind of punishment and still live. This chapter is just a peek of how much black comedy is used in this story.

It does not take long for black comedy to show up again in the story. In Chapter 4, the reader is reintroduced to Candide s tutor. Doctor Pangloss is described as:

He met a beggar who was covered with pustules, his eyes were sunken, the end of his nose was rotten off, his mouth twisted, his teeth black, he had a croaking voice and hacking cough, and spat a tooth every time he tried to speak.

If this were a living person he would have been dead a long time ago, not sitting in the street. Again this pulls the reader out of the story and slaps the story into a cartoon. I feel this is a problem for the reader. Every time you try to relate the story to human life, Voltaire goes to the extreme and puts his characters into a non-believable form.

As the story progresses, the black comedy gets thicker and thicker. Instead of using human suffering and pain, Voltaire decides to use natural forces. Voltaire makes it so that Candide goes through a shipwreck and then an earthquake in a matter of days. This could happen in real life, but it seems so absurd, that you can only laugh at the possibility that it could happen. By chapter five, the story is so unbelievable that you are not affected by any tragedies for the rest of the play.

One of the best examples of black comedy going to far is in chapter 10 when Cunegonde and the old woman are talking about whom has had the worst life. To get the full affect we must take a look at what has happened to Cunegonde in her life:

Ah, you poor old thing, said she, unless you have been raped by two Bulgars, been stabbed twice in the belly, seen two of your castles destroyed, witnessed the murder of two of your lovers being whipped in an auto-da-fe.

You can not help but wonder how a person can go through all this and still have the energy to argue over who has it worse. We then find out the old women has it worse then Cunegonde. You get a feeling of this even before she tells us by the first sentence. My eyes were not always bloodshot and red-rimmed, my nose did not always touch my chin, and I was not born a servant By this time in the story, the reader is so numb, that nothing can shock you. The old women goes on to tell us that she got married to a prince, and he died within two hours of their marriage. Next she goes on a voyage and gets taken over by pirates, where the pirates decide they need to cavity search them. They then stripped them naked and then the captain rapes the old woman. It s not over for the old women though, she then watches as her mom and others get pulled apart by men who wanted them. This black comedy is so unbelievable that once again the reader has to step back and just laugh and move on. Once again though, the main character survives. The fact that these two women are still alive is a great feat, but the fact that they have the energy to argue over weather or not who had a tougher life is just ridiculous. This is why the story is so hard to get into. The reader is taken away from the whole story because not a person on earth can relate to what these poor women have been through. In a normal story this might take your breath back and make you think about the poor tragedies that the old lady has been through. Not in this story though, it is just another extreme example of black comedy in an otherwise flooded story of black comedy.

By the ending chapters, blood shed, misery, disease, and deaths are a common thought in the reader s head. That is why it is almost expected in later chapters that there would be black comedy. For example, Voltaire decides to through in an execution in chapter 23. It is actually a relief to see that someone will die from a tragedy. An Admiral is being executed in front of the whole town. It does not phase the reader for we have seen this throughout the story. The twist of the whole situation is that he is being killed because he did not kill enough people when he went to battle. This situation has no effect on me anymore. In fact, I should have guessed that is why he was being executed in the first place.

One of the most unbelievable parts in this story is the fact that by the end of the story all the main characters are still alive. This is black comedy also. It makes you wonder how much a human can go through before they break. Candide suffers through beatings, shipwrecks, natural disaster, executions, and various other things, and still does not die. Cunegonde suffers through rape, disembowelment, stabbings, and other factors that are not survivable. It seems like every character in the story has a tragedy that accompanies them.

When reading the story Candide, the reader deals with so much black comedy, that it desensitizes the reader so that nothing strikes you anymore. Not only does black comedy make you laugh at horrible situations; it also turns believable characters into cartoons. The story would be much more enjoyable to read if Candide or any other main character was able to get hurt or die. Black comedy has its place in stories, but Voltaire goes to the extreme and gets the reader sick of it. I feel now that I have read this story, I can read any story and not be phased by what happens.