Comedy?

Ok, Candide. Certainly a book that drove me crazy as I started reading it. Already knowing this was a satire, I was looking forward for a laugh, but I had a hard time finding it. Took me a while to understand the tone Voltaire wrote this satire in. I finally got it, I finally was able to understand that tone of sarcasm.

I think without being able to understand that  tone Voltaire used in Candide, I would have interpreted the book in a complete different matter. From the first paragraph and I think it will happen until the last he used the four elements of satire:  irony, hyperbole, target, and absurdity. 

 

As I realized that this whole book was going to be based in sarcasm I knew it was going to be hard to read. I decided there was only one way for people to understand this extremely complicated book, everything they say, think of the opposite. All the books from old times have a trick, and they are complicated. Some may have advanced language, and some may just be full of irony. 

In the first chapter of Candide, Voltaire says the following while describing one of the characters: "The Baroness, whose weight of about twenty-five stone made her a person of great importance." If you are taking the book in a literal manner the thing that will come to minc is just that this person they called the Baroness is of great importance. But now read it again, and put it a sarcastic tone, analyze...   Well did you notice? Voltaire used the weight to say it was of great importance, in other words he was saying that the Baroness is fat. 

In what I've read by now I realize how everything they say in the book is implied and nothing is literal. Reading this book, I will have to develop a great amount of close reading skills to really understand the text of the classic, Candide.