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Voltaire's Candide: The Worst Of All Possible Worlds

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Candide: The Worst of All Possible Worlds

In Voltaire’s book, Candide, the main character undergoes numerous hardships and grueling tasks that help support the fact that Candide does not live in the best of all possible worlds. A perfect example is that throughout the whole book, Candide is forced to kill multiple people. In the best of all possible worlds, Candide would have never needed to kill anyone. Also Candide was searching for Cunegonde almost the whole book, only to be disappointed with an ugly Cunegonde. Pangloss believes that they live in the best of all possible worlds. This statement is false. With all the events that have gone against this belief, there is no way Candide could possibly live in the best of all possible worlds.
In order to argue that Candide lives in the worst of all possible worlds, one must define what the best of all possible worlds is like. In a best of all possible worlds, Candide would have not encountered any of the negative and bad events along his journey. He wouldn’t have had to kill numerous people and to begin with the journey wouldn't have existed. This is because …show more content…
Because Candide has to go on this journey to meet back up with Cunegonde, he encounters a lot of hardships along the way. One major problem Candide encountered was at the beginning of his journey when he joined the Bulgarian Army. Candide was forced to run the gauntlet. This is a gruesome event where the runner gets whipped by others. Candide was in so much pain he wanted to just die. “... Candide, able to bear no more, begged as a favour that they would be so good as to shoot him”(18). This just shows how horrible the gauntlet really is. In the best of all possible worlds, no one should have to endure the gauntlet. Candide lives in the worst of all possible worlds because he had to endure hardships such as the gauntlet on his

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