A Bold Destiny (Candide Chapters 1-5)

What most highlights in the novel is the way in which it is told. It is an uncommon way to narrate a novel since everything that is important, or at least important changes, are told in a brief way as if to not give them importance. It can be inferred that the material and physical life of Candide is not what eventually matters, but his actually mind an senesces towards the world and situations. He describes events as passing by, and fortunes of time: "After being turned out this earthly paradise, Candide wandered off without thinking which way he was going" (Candide 22). As it is axiomatical, Candide has just past from living in "the most beautiful and delightful of all possible mansions" to wandering off into the streets of uncertainty. It is a small sentence making a big change.

Amazingly enough, in Candide, free will and liberty are mentioned prematurely in the first pages of the novel. This is obviously because, Voltaire was most famously known as an Enlightenment writer, in which he expresses the indispensable needs of civil liberties.

So reflecting this in Candide, he evidently shows the opposite of free will when Candide is charged in the Bulgars court because of running away: " It was useless to declare his belief in

Free Will and say he wanted neither; he had to make his choice. So, exercising that divine gift called Liberty he decided to run the gauntlet thirty-six times"(Candide 24).

Voltaire expresses with this that their is no actual Liberty, at least not in the world he lived in.

Ultimately, as I expected to find, this novel contains somewhat of a satire tone, since it employs irony in a serious manner, after Candide finds Pangloss, and tells him about the destruction of the mansion: "As for the house, not one stone was left standing on another; not a barn was left, not a sheep, not a duck, not a tree" (Candide 28).

Irony is seen as the mansion is remembered as a beautiful place, and the reader looses hope as Candide is kicked out of it, but this actually saves his life. So he is saved by a bad scene, and also as the beautiful home is destroyed, with its integrants, brick by brick.