The Attitude on War Between Swift´s Travels and Voltaire´s Candide

Satirical works cause the reader to delve into the story and search for the message, rather than telling a story straightforwardly like newspaper articles do. Both Swift and Voltaire succeed in using and applying satire to their work in order to explain to the readers the life-hood of the eighteenth century. Even though, their stories might be fictional you can certainly recognize some events that really did happen in the past, for example, the idea of Spanish colonization of the Americas to search for gold, the idea of wars, and many other similarities. Both writers succeeded in laying the ideas of war, its benefits, and its downfall. Both Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Voltaire’s Candide explain the voyages of exceptionally gullible and innocent individuals to lands far from home whose outlooks on life, war, status, and education differ drastically from that of their own society, causing them to see their home societies very differently. Swift and Voltaire attitude toward war is very similar in which they both try to show the downfall of it, while they are different in using different approaches to explain it.

The attitude toward war between Swift and Voltaire is similar in which the lands both Gulliver and Candide visit are stricken by war and violence, while both Swift and Voltaire satirize the extremities of war in the modern society and the unnecessary horrors the people of those lands had to go through. The main reason Candide is forced to keep traveling is because his former home were destroyed in a battle and it became unsafe for him due to the violent soldiers all around the countries. On the other hand, some of the places Gulliver visits don’t usually take part of war; rather they seemed puzzled by the idea of war and...

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...view as he says at the end “we must cultivate our garden” (Swift 413), while both writes share similarities regarding the concept of war, their ideology is evidently different. While Swift tries to show that war is driven by human greed and it is always harmful to the people, Voltaire tries to have hopeful views that war might be the cause of a benefit or an advantage to someone or a country. In the end, war is usually harmful to both sides; the consequence is always dire, while the out-come is the death of countless innocent people.

Works Cited

Swift, Jonathan. "Gulliver’s Travels." The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Gen. ed. Martin Puchner. 3rd ed. Vol. D. New York: Norton, 2012. 265-321. Print.

Voltaire. "Candide, or Optimism." The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Gen. ed. Martin

Puchner. 3rd ed. Vol. D. New York: Norton, 2012. 352-415. Print.