In Voltaire’s famous novella, Candide, the protagonist, represents the naivety and innocence of youth. His mentor taught him to believe in the ultimate goodness of the world. However, this does not reflect the truth of much life experience. Martin is a character who recognizes the difficulties and evils of the world. Just as Pangloss, the mentor of Candide, represents complete optimism and faith, Martin represents a complete pessimistic outlook on life and the world.

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In the story, Martin acts as the balance to Pangloss. Just as Pangloss cannot see evil in the world and its peoples, Martin struggles to see goodness. Both of these characters are obviously an extreme example of a viewpoint; in this extreme example, Voltaire can highlight that one needs to moderate one’s views towards the world. Voltaire also exhibits how true life experience can impact one’s opinion of the world and the people in one’s life. It is also important that one does not hold to such a rigid dogma of the life experience. Obviously, Martin’s philosophy is as useless as the philosophy of Pangloss. Pangloss will be taken advantage of with his philosophy; he will not have the necessary life skills to protect himself from evil individuals. However, Martin’s philosophy is also useless. Martin will never see any goodness in the world or people in his life. With this philosophy, one will never find any happiness or joy in the life experience.

Martin does impact the development of Candide. Candide chooses Martin as his companion after he has been repeatedly used by individuals. The optimism of Candide allowed this to happen. He truly did not believe that individuals would swindle him for money; this was not consistent with the ideals Pangloss taught him. Martin, however, enters his life in an effort to explain that many individuals are not good. Some individuals are merely selfish and will use others. Candide needed to have something to balance his optimism. Balance is important. Purely philosophical ideals geared towards one view will not assist an individual.