Minor Characters In Candide

Although generally overlooked by the average recreational reader, minor characters have long served as incredibly useful tools in a variety of ways for many different authors across a multitude of works. Whether they serve as mouthpieces for a writer’s message, a personification of a specific philosophy, or are simply devices to move the plot along, minor characters are extraordinarily important in the vast majority of works, being carefully crafted and placed at certain instances by the creator of the work. As such, their importance and purpose in the works Dante’s Inferno, Candide, King Lear, and Monkey cannot be overstated, and while at first they may appear forgettable and non-essential, further analysis shows the ingenious nature of each

In Candide, Voltaire uses minor characters for a variety of purposes, such as to provide commentary on specific philosophies, criticism of religious figures, advancing the plot, and provide insight into the human condition, with characters such as Pangloss, the Grand Inquisitor, the baron, the Turkish farmer, and Martin serving to exemplify each of these. Pangloss is perhaps the most major minor character in Candide, and is primarily utilized as a means of commentary on the philosophy of extreme optimism, stating that the world that we inhabit is “the best of all possible worlds,” and that humanity should believe that everything that happens happens in order to make the world a better place. Pangloss takes this philosophy to an extreme however, maintaining his optimism in the face of contracting syphilis, experiencing an earthquake in Portugal, and being hanged as a heretic. He is utilized by Voltaire as a way to say that perhaps this world is not the best of all possible worlds, and that some things may occur that do not serve to improve the world in any way. On top of this, Pangloss’ imparting of such optimism onto Candide is in a way the catalyst for the majority of the events of the