"All is for the best" (pg.43)

“All is for the best” (pg.43) is one of the most common phrases throughout the book, it appears and reappears in many places after every negative event. It is a phrase that reflects what an optimistic person would say. Voltaire’s perspective about optimistic people is that they are naïve and they don’t know anything about life, people that lack of experience and therefore think everything is happy and perfect. He criticizes the naïve people the most in his text as they expect everything to turn out the way they want it and life is not this way. Maybe his feeling of dislike towards this people was because he wasn’t an optimist person and seeing people that have hope for better things seems pathetic and unrealistic.

The book itself is pretty unrealistic and the events are absurd in the sense that many things are not reasonable. After every event something positive happens and it turns the story into a type of “fairytale”. The chronologies in which events take place help the reader realize that the story has a sarcastic side to it. Voltaire tries to prove that it is not probable that after something negative all of a sudden something great happens that changes your world upside down. To prove his point he creates a fantasy story that it is very illogical and does not happen in real life. When Pangloss dies Candide is left alone and almost dead then out of the blue a miracle happens and Lady Cunegonde , the love of his life(who was supposed to be dead), reappears in his life a few days later. How unrealistic is this?

Then Lady Cunegonde tells Candide the story of what happened to her and when they are having dinner Candide kills the “owners” of Lady Cunegonde just as an act of jealousy. This is simply absurd; it is irrational and very unlikely to happen.  Killing two men in a matter of minutes and getting away with it leaving everything behind is nonsense. I think this is another way of mocking naïve people. Voltaire implies that Candide is so naïve that he thinks they can get away with that crime but will they really get away? Will this be for the best? Will everything turn out perfectly fine?