Fighting Windmills by Durán Manuel Rogg Fay R. & Fay R. Rogg

Author:Durán, Manuel,Rogg, Fay R. & Fay R. Rogg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2006-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Voltaire’s Cardboard Characters

Cervantes manages a feat that other writers will find inspiring: he creates situations and characters that ring true and express deep human emotions, and moreover they develop and change throughout the novel. If we compare to these characters the ones created by Voltaire, we may notice that the characters created by the French writer are somewhat pale and cardboard-like. We know nothing, or next to nothing, about the intimate life of a character as important as Pangloss. He is a mouthpiece for certain philosophical ideas, but his true identity is not revealed to us. Don Quixote’s evolution in part 2, the changes in Sancho, who grows in importance as the novel develops, and the interaction between the knight and his squire are essential traits of Cervantes’s novel.

In contrast, Voltaire creates comic effects by underlining the opposite: his characters, especially Pangloss, do not change in spite of all the changes in their lives. Thus in chapter 28, Candide asks Pangloss if, after having suffered so many adversities, after having been hanged by the Inquisition (but we know the rope was wet, the hanging knot poorly made, which allowed him to survive), then dissected by a Portuguese surgeon (who luckily did not finish his task), beaten many times and compelled to row in a galley, he still thinks that everything is for the best in this world: “‘I have always abided by my first opinion,’ answered Pangloss, ‘for, after all, I am a philosopher, and it would not become me to retract my sentiments, especially since Leibniz could not be wrong.”’13 As an aside, note also how Pangloss quite often makes use of philosophical and technical words that his traveling companions do not understand, just as Don Quixote’s vocabulary is often unclear to Sancho.

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