Candide's Pangloss: Voltaire's Tragicomic Hero.

PERHAPS the most celebrated character in Voltaire's Candide, Pangloss, the ridiculous scholar and pseudo-philosopher, has entertained millions of readers with his incorrigibly stubborn optimism and unintentional humor. Indeed, several intrigued scholars have attempted to identify the real-world acquaintance who they assume inspired Voltaire's ludicrous creation. (1) But is the bumbling scholar evil rather than naive? Voltaire expert Haydn Mason argues that almost everyone in the tale is basically malevolent, "gratuitously murderous or deceitful" (10)--including Pangloss. He believes that the loquacious "all-tongue" (his name's Greek transliteration), whose cognomen also reminds one of Pan, the Greek sex-obsessed satyr and woodland god, is incorrigibly narcissistic. Noting that Pangloss has acquired a great deal of historical and philosophical information to no purpose, Mason regards him as "a hollow character," "doomed" obstinately "to plough the same furrow over and over until he dies" (80). He points to the incident in chapter 5, when Candide is knocked down by flying stones during the Lisbon earthquake and begs his companion to procure "a little wine and oil" to revive him. Initially Pangloss, preoccupied with explaining the reasons for the earthquake in terms of philosophical Optimism, ignores his importuning. Finally, after Candide loses consciousness, he brings him some water, "a poor substitute worthy of that impractical philosopher," Mason critically observes (65-66).