Theme

=Theme =

Voltaire’s purpose of writing //Candide// was clearly to disprove the theory of optimism or that the world is the “best of all possible worlds.” This is the main theme of //Candide//, and it is demonstrated through the characters’ many problems. Voltaire uses situations like Candide’s loss of love, the war between the Bulgars and Avars, a myriad of stories about rape and murder, and unavoidable instances of bad fortune to prove that the world is not, in fact, the “best of all possible worlds.” Clearly, Voltaire wanted to counter his contemporaries’ philosophies and share this rejection with the rest of society.