The title character Candide reminds me of Don Quixote from The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes. Both characters are extremely naive and ingenuous to the point that they seem stupid. When Candide experiences many hardships such as starvation, war, storm, and earthquake, instead of accepting reality, he tries to justify these events. He stubbornly follows his tutor's absurd optimistic philosophy despite all the sufferings he experienced. This incapability of accepting the reality is what makes Candide similar to Don Quixote. Don Quixote is mislead by adventure books. He believes himself to be a knight and takes harmful actions such as attacking a windmill to accomplish his chivalric ideals. Whether it is optimism or adventure novels, these things keep these characters into thinking reality is one way when, in fact, it is very different. They are these types of people who think everyone is moral and that everything will turn out for the best, when in fact people they encounter treat them dishonestly and events are hurtful. Although their skewed perspectives on life make them interesting, I often get annoyed at them for not being able to accept reality the way it is. They need to snap out of it and start realizing that these obvious occurrences that are happening around them are contradicting their beliefs.
The connection you did between Don Quixote and Candide was amazing. I had never made that relation, but as you explained it and gave your opinion about it I completely agree with you. However, what I liked the most was how you also talk about optimist people and how they have to start to face reality as it is. I agree, they think that by giving difficult things a positive attitude those thing will look better, maybe on the surface, but on the inside, they are still as bad and thats what gets me angry too. That that is the reason why we don't change certain bad aspects of life, because we don't accept that they are bad because we are to "optimist".
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