What a phenomenally tragic, yet completely hilarious story.  If you are into satirical philosophical tragedies than this book was made for you.  The story is unbelievably amazing.  Candide is constantly out of luck, yet he pushes forward with the knowledge that everything is for the best.  He gets into the most complicated of predicaments on his quest for his love, but remains optimistic.  His tutor, in the end, has trouble being optimistic, “Pangloss asserted that he had undergone dreadful sufferings; but having once stated that everything went on as well as possible, he still maintained it, and at the same time he didn’t believe it at all.” (Voltaire 127) The situations that he gets into with his friends’ cause him to look carefully on what is true of god and mankind.  He travels the globe and through history to always find people who have had even worse luck. He finally gets all that he ever desired, just not in the way that he had wanted.  When he finally begins living a normal life the question is asked, “I would be glad to know which is worse: to be raped a hundred times by black pirates, to have one buttock cut off, to run the gauntlet among the Bulgarians, to be whipped and hanged at an auto-da-fé, to be dissected, to be chained to the oar in a galley; and in short to experience all the miseries through which everyone of us has passed, or to remain here doing nothing?” (Voltaire 127) He makes a difficult transition from constantly searching, voyaging, and enduring pains and miseries to having a normal uneventful life.  In the end he finds satisfaction in life by “cultivating his garden” in the company of his good friends. (Voltaire 130) It is an absolutely comical novel and a must read.

Source:

Voltaire. Candide. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2003. Print.