The Manichean Alternative
Manichaeism holds that the world is a battlefield between good and evil forces — that darkness is not merely the absence of light but an active, independent principle. Martin's version is secular: he does not claim theological precision, only empirical observation. He has looked at the world as it actually operates and concluded that a benevolent God either cannot or does not govern it. Every city covets its neighbour; every family plots against another; everywhere the weak are crushed by the powerful.
I own to you that when I cast an eye on this globe, or rather on this little ball, I cannot help thinking that God has abandoned it to some malignant being. I except, always, El Dorado. I scarcely ever knew a city that did not desire the destruction of a neighbouring city, nor a family that did not wish to exterminate some other family. Everywhere the weak execrate the powerful, before whom they cringe; and the powerful beat them like sheep whose wool and flesh they sell.
The Accuracy of Pessimism
Martin is the novel's most reliable narrator. His predictions are consistently borne out. When Candide showers presents on Paquette and Friar Giroflée, Martin predicts they will soon be miserable again — and they are. Martin's pessimism is not a mood but a methodology: attend to what has actually happened, not to what optimistic doctrine requires. In a novel full of naïve characters who learn nothing from experience, Martin already knows.
The Limit of Pessimism
Yet Martin is not the novel's final word. His pessimism, like Pangloss's optimism, is a total system — a framework that predetermines what experience can mean. Martin's error is the same as Pangloss's: he has decided in advance what the world is, and no evidence can revise him. The gardening conclusion of Candide implicitly rejects both Pangloss and Martin: the truth is not that all is for the best, nor that all is irremediably wretched, but that some things can be tended, improved, and made to grow.
Martin first appears in Chapter XIX, hired by Candide as the most suitably pessimistic travelling companion. His Manichaeism — the view that evil is an independent metaphysical power — alludes to an ancient Persian dualist religion that influenced early Christianity before being condemned as heretical.
Related Concepts
