Satire In Disguise

Somebody once told me that if while reading the book Candide I found it boring I was not getting the purpose of the book. To tell you truth I got worried because I was finding the book boring and wasn’t laughing like everyone else. All of this changed after I read chapters 13 and 14. “I am the daughter of Pope Urban X” (page 49) with this Voltaire is criticizing the hypocrisy of religion, how the Pope did not follow the churches rule by having a daughter and how he did not protect her from all the misfortunes she lived through.

Voltaire employs satire when he targets the aristocracy, “Governor, Don Fernando d‘Íbaraa y Figueora y Mascarenes y Lampourdos y Souza a noblemen with degree of pride and appropriate to one who bore so many names.” (page 58). He mocks how this people always want to show how important they are and the amount of power and money they have. The hyperbole would be the long list of names. We find irony when the old lady tells Lady Cunegonde “you have only yourselves to blame if you do not become the wife of the greatest nobleman in South America with the most handsome of moustaches.”(59) this is both ironic and absurd, he is not the greatest nobleman man there is “he (…) assuming so imposing an attitude, and affecting such an arrogant bearing”(59) and the part about the mustache is random, is has nothing to do with weather he is a great nobleman or not.

Hence, satire is dominant through the essence of Voltaire's text. He employs it both directly and indirectly to target different aspects of society. In this case aristocracy. He has a target, now he ridiculizes the context in order to perform critique.