Candide #1

12/15

In Chapter III, Voltaire uses irony, diction, tone, and sentence structure to satire war, religion, the philosophy of optimism, and the human failing of lust. When Voltaire writes that the Bulgars, who represent the Prussians, and the Avars, who represent the French, fought in a “splendid, brilliant, smart or orderly” manner, he is criticizing war and the glorification of it. He uses situational irony to say that the instruments of war “produced a harmony whose equal was never heard in hell,” though the reader knows that war is nothing like “harmony” and that the commanders of war are the ones who are most likely going to “hell.” Voltaire writes that the “rifle fire removed from the best of worlds about nine or ten thousand men.” This is an understatement because the narrators describes nonchalantly that 9,000 to 10,000 men were killed, though they only died because of the “heroic carnage.” The use of “or” says that those thousand soldiers between 9,000 and 10,000 were just a statistic and only that. Voltaire says that after the war, “Te Deums,” or hymns, were sung. He satirizes religion because there is nothing sacred about war and it is quite the opposite of the ideals of harmony and peace expressed in religion. Voltaire states that Candide went “elsewhere to reason about cause and effect” even though the battlefield is enough to show this, mocking war and the philosophy of optimism. Voltaire then says how soldiers from both nations had destroyed the nearby villages “in accordance with international law,” satirizing how government support destroys innocent people.