Satire In Candide

According to Dictionary.com, satire is defined as the use of humor, irony, exaggeration or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices. In the modern world, satire is a fixture of Western life, seen everywhere from the Simpsons to Last Week Tonight. Satire brings out the flaws in humanity and amplifies them so that audiences can see the hypocrisy of their actions, but this is done in a humorous way to facilitate the audience’s acceptance of criticism. Countless people have written high social works on what is wrong in our society, including Voltaire, but the work Voltaire is best known for is his satirical novel Candide. Similar to Voltaire, Adams is most well known for his novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a modern …show more content…
Both Voltaire and Candide explore themes that have been common throughout time, such as religion, government, and social norms. Satires will often explore many of the same ideas because of human nature and its constant issues. The imperfection of government and religion have been an ever-evolving and constant issue throughout a history of uprisings, revolutions, and reconfiguration. Despite these common themes, the execution and evolution of these issues have great influence on the impact on the actualized product. Both authors make fun of religion in particular. Adams makes fun of creationism when the people who are creating the second earth say that “...unless you would care to take a stroll on the surface of New Earth. It’s only half completed, I’m afraid-we haven’t even finished burying the artificial dinosaur skeletons in the crust yet, and then we have the Tertiary and Quaternary Periods of the Cenozoic Era to lay down, and…” (Adams 175). Here, Adams is obviously making fun of God and Creationism with both the ideas of people creating and falsifying fossils on a new Earth. The idea of humans creating beyond their perceived limitations is obviously sacrilegious to spiritual people, who believe God is the divine creator of Earth and the galaxy. For humans to not only destroy the Earth but then make a New Earth shows a complete disregard for the role

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Candide Satire

Examples Of Satire In Candide