The Candide

Don’t Tell Me, Show Me

Let’s face it. There are some amazing books out there, but in my opinion, an awesome book consists of great imagery. If an author can draw me in with language that is explicit and can stimulate my senses, it’s worth the read. I love it when an author can show me rather than just telling me. During the semester, the class was asked to read the work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground and Voltaire’s Candide. Both literary works are written to entertain and draw the audience in. They also give the audience a good sense of visual imagery throughout their stories. In this paper, I will discuss some of the examples of visual imagery I’ve came across while reading. I will also discuss how they exemplify each author’s writing genres as well as compare their views on the human condition. Now let’s start off with a brief overview of both Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground and Voltaire’s Candide.

Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground is an interesting story of subjective human experience rather than objective truths. It tells of a spiteful and isolate man, known as the Underground Man. He is a nihilist, believing in absolutely nothing, but only what is truth to him. He has no desire to interact with others, totally dislikes society and everyone who is in it. In Part I, he explains his personality and gives his reason for living underground. In Part II, he depicts some significant events in his life. We see how the Underground Man’s unable to interact with other people and his effort to form relationships and involve himself in life end in failure, and he isolates himself deeper underground. You start to get a sense of how his way of thinking in Part I has influenced his actions in Part II. By the end of the book, he is a disturbed, spiteful, and alienated antihero.

Voltaire’s Candide is a story based around philosophy. Candide is the main character. He is naïve and idealistic to a tremendous degree. Innocently, he blindly accepts...