Voltaire's Candide: Literary Analysis

In the novella Candide the author Voltaire chooses to end his book with the words, “we must cultivate our garden,” this ending line to the book had a pessimistic connotation. This line implies that in order to really progress in the world you need to focus on ways to fix yourself rather than focusing on ways to engage with others in order to find ways to fix the world. Two characters in Candide who portray the meaning of this line throughout the story are Candide and Pangloss. Both Candide and Pangloss face different occurrences during the story that prove that if they had worked on fixing themselves based on the way they thought at the time, they would have ended up in much better places. Throughout the book Candide, one character who proved that the last line of the story had a pessimistic meaning was Pangloss. For instance, when Pangloss still lived in castle of westphalia he was a professor who taught and proved that, “Admirably there is no effect without …show more content…
Through this it is clear why the ending line, “we must cultivate our own garden,” has a pessimistic meaning emphasizing that in order to truly progress in life you have to focus on ways to fix yourself instead of finding ways to fix and progress the world because; due to Pangloss’s way of thinking he could never truly focus on how the world could affect him as a result he could never really fix himself too change for the better. In addition to this, later on in the story when Candide meets up with Pangloss once again