Satire: a New Way of Writing in Voltaire

 In  Candide, the author seems to focus on satire as his main writing style during the whole text. He dramatizes and exaggerates every aspect of the story through his main character Candide. Voltaire focuses on ridiculizing Westphalia starting with the stereotypical aristocracies of Europe, “…that in the best of all possible worlds, his lordships country seat was the most beautiful of all ”(19). Clearly as described before, this grand mansion is really a simple house with a door and no windows which makes it absurd to call such a thing a mansion where one of the most influential noblemen live. Another example of absurd is when Candide suddenly decides that after being beat up by the Burglars because of his cause and effect theory, he now wants to find somewhere else to pursue his reasoning. This cause and effect theory comes  from Dr. Pangloss, a philosopher who perhaps is the only one who exists in town, and here is where the reader can decode Voltaire’s mocking humor toward’s Pangloss and his teachings of “ metaphysico-theologo-cosmolo-nigology”(20).

The second aspect of satire, hyperbole, is his way of testing the reader to actually capture these events and take them in as a simple exaggeration in every matter. For example, “Rifle –fire which followed rid this best worlds of about nine or ten thousand villains who infested its surface” (25), here you can tell that that extremely huge number of villains doesn’t make sense if there talking about such a small and simple Westphalia. His descriptions are also so detailed and in this case gruesome, that you sense the hyperbole thanks to the diction Voltaire chooses to use; ”Whichever way he looked, the ground was strewn with the legs, arms, and brains of dead villagers ”(26).

Voltaire has a unique way to introduce certain issues in the story such as the STD Dr. Pangloss has recently acquired; “ In her arms I tasted the delights of paradise, and they produce these hellish torments by which you see me devoured ”(30). Instead of taking a direct approach on the characters sickness, he simply chooses for the dialogue between Pangloss and Candide to be obvious enough that you can infer it’s a sexually transmitted disease.