Candide Analysis based on theme, style and criticism

Greider goes on to cite further examples in her critique of the work of how the orthodox rhetoric creates reactions in the reader that contradictory to our actual reactions. Greider goes on to further identify the paradox between reality and the ideal as things the reader has been "taught to accept as odious is here (evident in the novel), by compression and repetition, reduced to meaningless and, more serious, indicted as the cause of human suffering"(Greider). This is to say that, like in chapter three when Candide is off at war, and he sees the soldiers viewing "wives dying with their throat cut, and hugging their children to their breast, all stained blood,"(Voltaire 17) things like murder and rape become overused and that perhaps the constant repetition has created apathy and that is the cause of human suffering. If everyone is willing to accept that everything that happens is the best possible thing, then there is no real emotion, people become apathetic.

In chapter two the Bulgarian soldiers engage Candide into conversation and then, "drink to his health" (Voltaire 11). It is here that in Candide accepting this he becomes a soldier, but as the Bulgarian soldier say, "you are now the support, the defender, the hero of the Bulgarians…"(Voltaire 11). Take note that the word soldier is not used, but rather the word hero. Hero goes onto assert that perhaps this is the best thing that could have happened to Candide, but as the reader continues on to the end of chapter two he or she realizes that, "he had gone through two flogging…that made for him exactly 4,000 strokes, which lay bare all his muscles and nerves form nape of his neck to his rump"(Voltaire 11).

Perhaps Voltaire's two crowning stylistic devices are his lack of characterization and his use of paradox and antithesis. Voltaire has absent narration, which is to say that the narrator is not a character within the novel, but he is no omniscient either because he is biased to. He presents things in the most positive light. The Voltaire's use of diction for the narrator is always positive, "Never was anything so gallant, so well accourted, so brilliant, and so finely disposed as the two armies." (Voltaire 17) Words like gallant, accourted, and brilliant have such optimistic meanings, but with the repetition, three in one sentence, one can begin to see what Greider was considering in her critique that they become meaningless. That’s a paradox because something violent like war, which is what the sentence prior was describing, assumes glory in its diction, but arouses no emotion.

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