Candide Point of View
TEXTUAL EVIDENCE
Any time you're explaining something about a text, you need to cite, or point out, textual evidence to support your ideas. Textual evidence may be a word, phrase, sentence, or paragraph that led you to make an inference or draw a conclusion. When you cite textual evidence, someone else can look back at a particular part of a text you read and understand how you came to your inferences or conclusions.
When you make inferences while reading or analyzing a text, you use the text and your own background knowledge to make logical guesses about what is not directly stated by the author. When you are explaining these inferences to someone else, it is important that you use textual evidence to show how and why you analyzed a text in the way that you did.
For example, an analysis of Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken," in which the speaker describes coming to a fork on a forest path and having to choose which one to take, might state:
The difficulty of making choices is an important theme of Frost's poem. The same analysis is strengthened by going on to cite textual evidence:
Frost establishes this theme in the first few lines. "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood," the speaker begins, "and sorry I could not travel both / and be one traveler, / long I stood . . . ." Immediately, we see that the speaker is faced with a tough choice: which way to go.
Whether you're making inferences from a short passage or drawing conclusions based on an entire text, textual evidence is the most important tool for helping you explain your ideas.
TEXTUAL EVIDENCE AND CANDIDE
Whenever you make an inference about any kind of text, you must cite textual evidence that supports your inference.
Inferences are logical guesses about what is not directly, or explicitly, stated by the author.
To make an inference, follow these steps:
Read closely and critically. Consider why an author gives particular details and information.
Think about what you already know. Use your own knowledge, experiences, and observations to help figure out things that the author doesn’t directly state.
Cite the specific words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs from a text that lead you to make an inference. This is the textual evidence that supports the inference.
Find the most relevant textual evidence that supports your inference.
Textual evidence for fiction can include:
Details about setting and plot events.
Details about characters, including what characters do and say, and what is said about them.
Interactions between characters.
Use of language in dialogue and descriptions, including dialect, figures of speech, and connotative word meanings.
Textual evidence should also be used to support the analysis of various elements in a story. These include the story’s theme, its point of view, and the author’s choices.
It's crucial to cite strong and thorough textual evidence. This evidence should support an analysis of what the text says explicitly, as well as any inferences drawn from the text.
CANDIDE
Satire is much like an inside joke. If you don’t understand the reality of the situation or the characteristics of the time in history, you may miss the intended humor, irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or exaggeration. In Chapter 1 of Voltaire’s novella Candide, the author satirizes German nobility and the Leibnizian philosophy of optimism through the story’s narration and action. To understand the satire, readers need to pay close attention to textual evidence and use details and prior knowledge to “get the joke.” Consider the first paragraph:
In a castle of Westphalia, belonging to the Baron of Thunder-ten-Tronckh, lived a youth, whom nature had endowed with the most gentle manners. His countenance was a true picture of his soul. He combined a true judgment with simplicity of spirit, which was the reason, I apprehend, of his being called Candide. The old servants of the family suspected him to have been the son of the Baron’s sister, by a good, honest gentleman of the neighborhood, whom that young lady would never marry because he had been able to prove only seventy-one quarterings, the rest of his genealogical tree having been lost through the injuries of time
On first read, it might appear that Voltaire is simply introducing characters and stating relationships. But the author has crafted his description for the purpose of satire. Voltaire was writing in the mid-1700s, when nobility still held a great deal of privilege and was often governed by strict rules of behavior. The Baron’s comical sounding name— Baron of Thunder-ten-Tronckh —pokes fun at the overly impressive titles of even minor nobles in Voltaire’s day. The Baron’s sister’s refusal to marry Candide’s father “because he had been able to prove only seventy-one quarterings ”is an example of irony. To appreciate the irony it helps to know what a “quartering” is and to understand that nobles in the 1700s could lose their titles for marrying a commoner. A quartering refers to how many generations back a person could trace their noble heritage. A person with seventy-one quarterings would come from a very long line of nobility, yet that was not good enough for the Baron’s snobby sister. Some prior knowledge also helps the reader better appreciate the satire in paragraph 4:
Pangloss was professor of metaphysico-theologico-cosmolo-nigology. He proved admirably that there is no effect without a cause, and that, in this best of all possible worlds, the Baron’s castle was the most magnificent of castles, and his lady the best of all possible Baronesses.
The long string of subjects that Pangloss studies is a clue that Voltaire is poking fun at someone or something. Even without prior knowledge, a reader might infer from the textual evidence that Voltaire is mocking philosophers and intellectuals who study a wide variety of subjects and profess to be masters of all of them. However, to understand that Voltaire’s main target is Gottfried Leibniz requires prior knowledge that Leibniz studied metaphysics, religion, cosmology, mathematics, and law.
Similarly, a reader might well find the irony in Voltaire’s assertion that Pangloss “proved admirably that there is no effect without a cause” using only textual evidence. The use of the word admirably to describe something that seems obvious to readers signals that Voltaire is mocking Pangloss. But the satire takes on added meaning if the reader knows that Leibniz had an elaborate theory of causation that held that causes had built-in effects. In other words, the effects were predetermined; thus, things had to be the way they were.
Text evidence alone would be sufficient to make clear the satire in Pangloss’s claim that the Baron and Baroness lived in the “best of all possible worlds. ” Over the course of the story, the events that befall the characters disprove the claim over and over again. But here again, a reader’s prior knowledge of Leibniz and social and political conditions in the 1700s would increase understanding of Voltaire’s point of view. Leibniz and his followers argued that God had created the best of all possible universes, and everything in it—even things that were painful or seemed evil—ultimately served a good end. To Voltaire, this assertion was absurd.