Candide chapters 4-5

In Candide's chapters 4-5, Candide shows a kind and humble disposition, and helps a strange man whom he meets on the street, as a deformed beggar named Pangloss. Little does he know that this man who he unselfishly helped, ends up becoming his best friend. Pangloss has very strange ideas about life, but they interest Candide. He teaches Candide his unchangeable theory of life. This theory, that all things in life happen for the better, is a way of life in which only optimistic people can adapt to. Pangloss has used this theory as a guideline for his way of living life. In order to follow this way of life, your mind must be able to change its original way of thinking, and see everything in life as a positive aspect. Even in the worst of times, you must be able to believe that whatever it is that is ocurring is for the better and that only good can come out of it. Pangloss contracted Syphallis and even in this hard and horrific time, he believes that the sickness is the best of both worlds. He was poor and did not have anywhere to go in life. Candide hires him as his own personal bookeeper and because he knows better then to leave his friend without professional help, seeks a doctor to help cure him of his fatal disease.

When the doctor hears of Pangloss´ theory of life, he tries to convince him otherwise but fails in his attempt to do so. The doctor retaliates by saying, “men have somehow corrupted Nature.” God never gave men weapons, he claims, but men created them “in order to destroy themselves.

Later on in the fifth chapter, Voltaire shows how men, when given privileges, become greedy and do things that they might have thought hypocritical before. Candide, Pangloss, and the sailor are the only men that survive a terrible shipwreck. Once they manage to reach an island they see that it is the island of Lisbon and it has just experienced a terrible earthquake which left some dead and many wounded. The sailor finds stray money on the island and decides to use it to get drunk and pay women for sex; meanwhile, Candide and Pangloss try to help the victims of the catastrophe and tell them that it was for the better to help them psychologically and they also try to provide as much medical care as possible.

Should they have helped totally and complete strangers, who most of had no chance of surviving, or should they have done what the sailor did and spent the money on material things for themselves? The answer depends on your morals and how greedy you are as a person.