Stories of the Past

Structurally, I've noticed that Candide is very choppy. There are tons of chapters and each is only a few pages long. I've been wondering as I read why Voltaire has chosen to organize the novel this way. Is it a kind of thematic separation? Is there a pattern? All the poetic work we've been doing in class had got me wondering about separation serving a purpose. Voltaire was a well educated guy, I think there's little chance that he just made chapters end and begin at his whim. The book is also very shy of any kind of flowery detail. It almost seems as though it is an overview (maybe a sort of lengthy sparknotes) of some other story. Singular moments are never described, just happenings or events. Feelings of characters are rarely recounted to the reader by the third person narrator. But, when we as readers learn about the old woman and Ms Cunegonde's past, they are told in third person. There are no quotation marks or anything having to do with punctuation to indicate to us that it is them speaking either directly to us or to Candide but we infer. Why doesn't Voltaire keep a consistent point of view? What is added to the story that we are hearing the old woman and Ms Cunegonde's stories of their pasts through what we can assume are their own words?  Maybe the purpose of concise chapters and descriptions as well as that of a momentary shift to first person will reveal itself as I read on.

 I also find the novel to line up perfectly with my current studying of European history. We learn of an inquisitor who takes Ms. Cunegonde as a kind of sexual hostage, which makes sense because it seems as though Voltaire is writing of a time period slightly earlier than his own, perhaps during the religious and thirty years' war. This makes sense, because in the exposition, Voltaire establishes that the castle in which Candide has grown up is in fact in Westphalia. The thirty years' war was essentially all of Europe fighting for the German states' religion (Sweden, France, etc for the protestants and Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, Wallenstein, etc for the Catholics). Ms. Cunegonde is raped and beaten by an army of Catholic Bulgarian soldiers, something not very uncommon of the time. The autonomous German states' nobility were stripped of power and possession (even their lives in the case of the baron of Westphalia and Cunegonde's mother) by both armies in their efforts of victory and conquest. After the war's end, the very land and people the war had been about were left poor and devastated an in a state of total economic collapse. In fact, the treaty that brought the thirty years' war to an end was called the Treaty of Westphalia, so through inference, we can deduce that Candide and Cunegonde's homeland was a major point of battle and also totally destroyed. The characters also refer very derogatorily to the Jew who shares Ms Cunegonde with the Grand Inquisitor, which is to be expected of most Western European peoples of this time. My recent learning about this time period in European history has really aided and enhanced my understanding of the story, especially in its historical context.