Candide

by Abigail Sarmiento

In Candide everything in the book is exaggerated, dramatic, and just ridiculous, but that’s the whole point. Voltaire essentially takes the idea that “everything happens for a reason” and bends it until it breaks.

The story follows a man named Candide, who starts off painfully optimistic, the kind of optimistic that honestly gets on the reader’s nerves or at least on mine. He’s taught that this is “the best of all possible worlds,” and then life proceeds to absolutely wreck him over and over again. War, disasters, betrayal, greed, and it just keeps piling on. The suffering becomes so constant and over the top that it almost feels numb, which I think is exactly what Voltaire wanted. It’s satire, but it doesn’t feel light or playful but instead it feels sharp and tired and frustrated with the world.

What stuck with me most is how the book questions blind optimism. Candide keeps trying to believe that everything is fine, that there’s some grand plan, that suffering must mean something meanwhile the world is just cruel and unfair without explanation. It feels like watching someone try to romanticize their pain because accepting randomness is scarier. That hit harder than I expected. There’s something painful about seeing these just happening and not have any meaning behind it.

The characters drift in and out of the story in strange ways, giving a sense that nothing is permanent. People disappear then sometimes reappear, relationships don’t feel stable, and happiness never lasts it essentially creates this restless feeling. I wouldn’t say the characters are deeply developed, but they don’t need to be, they’re more like symbols of different mindsets and flaws. Everyone represents some extreme: greed, blind faith, pessimism, vanity.It makes the world feel theatrical, like a stage meant to expose ideas rather than tell a soft, emotional story.

But what I appreciated most is the ending. After all the chaos and philosophical spirals, the message becomes surprisingly simple: just tend your own garden. Stop trying to explain the entire universe. Stop believing suffering is secretly beautiful. Just do the work in front of you and build small, real peace. There’s something quietly comforting about that. It’s not dramatic hope. It’s practical survival.

Reading Candide feels like spiraling existential dread mixed with dry humor and moments where you just blink at the page. It’s weirdly modern for something written so long ago. If you like stories that question everything, poke at blind positivity, and use absurdity to expose truth, it’s worth reading. It doesn’t try to comfort you instead it tries to wake you up. It’s messy, cynical, dramatic, and strangely grounding all at once.