Comparing Evil In Candide And Kosinski's Being There
407 Words2 Pages
Voltaire’s Candide and Kosinski’s novel, Being There mutually contain naïve and feeble-minded main characters that are forced to view the world in a fresh perspective. Candide is a novel portraying the various misfortunes of a kind-hearted, but childlike gentleman. Being There is a novel revealing the unexpected journey of a naïve gardener who knows has little knowledge; consequently by the ending he attains a position of immense power. Both of these novels have characters, themes, symbols, tone, settings, techniques, and targets that coincide, but in different ways. The Folly of Optimism is the constant theme in the novel Candide. Pangloss and his student Candide maintain this idea that “everything is for the best in this best of all possible…show more content… This concept is a beginner’s version of the viewpoints of a number of Enlightenment thinkers. To these theorists, the reality of evil in the world would be a sign that God is either not wholly virtuous or not all-powerful, and the belief of a flawed God is ludicrous. These philosophers took God’s existence and concluded that since God must be perfect, the world he created must be perfect also. With that idea philosophers believe that people become engulfed on these imperfections in the world only because they do not understand the full scope of God’s intentions. Since Voltaire does not accept that a faultless God or any God has to exist, he mocks the idea that the world is required to be completely upright, and he piles cruel and harsh satire on this idea throughout the novel. The optimists, Pangloss and Candide, undergo and observe a broad variety of horrors such as beatings, rapes, robberies, undeserved executions, disease, an earthquake, betrayals, and overwhelming dissatisfaction. These terrors do not show a future of greater good, but only point out the hatred and folly of humankind and the irrelevance of the natural world. Pangloss