Essay Comparing Candide And Tartuffe

A French philosopher and writer, Voltaire, wrote the novella Candide in the late 17th Century. Candide is a dark comedy describing many atrocities and dark events throughout the life of the eternal optimist, Candide, the main character. A similar masterpiece, Tartuffe, was written in the 17th century by Moliere as a satirical display of religious hypocrisy. Tartuffe is a production of vice and virtue that involves a witty and brusque family that idolizes a single religious figure who tries to insinuate himself into their lives. The two masterpieces, Candide, and Tartuffe, display exaggerated evil and whimsical events of religious hypocrisy and fanaticism, yet Moliere and Voltaire use very different writing styles to achieve that. Voltaire's masterpiece, Candide, has a contrary writing style to Moliere in Tartuffe. Voltaire fancies listing things throughout Candide, along with creating unnecessary run on sentences, and too much punctuation including; dashes, commas, and semicolons. Where as, Tartuffe, is written in a play format with short and snippy sentences, creating incomplete fragments of sentences and dialogue.
For example, Candide claims to be the best man in the world but then murders three men, two of them priests. “... I am the best man in the world, and here are three men I’ve killed already, and two of the three were priests,” (123). In Tartuffe, the grandmother of the family, Madame Pernelle, wanted the family name to be upheld by supporting Tartuffe, but did not see the hidden evil of Tartuffe which would curse the family name. In both stories several instances of good and evil juxtapositions, first seeing the good intentions of the characters, followed by the exaggerated evil that lies underneath the event. Good and evil juxtapositions, as well as excess and moderation, are themes commonly revisited throughout both Candide and