. . . [W]hen they were not arguing, the boredom was so fierce that
one day the old woman ventured to say: —I should like to know which
is worse, being raped a hundred times by negro pirates, having a
buttock cut off, running the gauntlet in the Bulgar army, being
flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fé, being dissected and rowing
in the galleys—experiencing, in a word, all the miseries through
which we have passed—or else just sitting here and doing nothing?
—It’s a hard question, said Candide. These words gave rise to new
reflections, and Martin in particular concluded that man was bound
to live either in convulsions of misery or in the lethargy of boredom.
By Chapter 30,
Candide and his friends have money, peace, and security, and Candide
has finally married Cunégonde. But, as the old woman points out,
these rare blessings have not brought them happiness. This passage
implies that human beings do not suffer only as a result of political
oppression, violent crime, war, or natural disaster. They suffer
also from their own intrinsic flaws of chronic bad-temperedness
and restlessness. Up to this point, all of the characters have been
marvelously adept at getting themselves out of difficult or miserable
situations. Faced with boredom in the absence of suffering, however,
they cannot seem to find any way out on their own, and turn to “a
very famous dervish” for advice. The one site of unmixed goodness
and joy presented in the novel is the paradise of Eldorado, which
Candide and Cacambo choose to leave. At the time, their decision
to venture back into the world seems unwise. By this point in the
novel, however, the reader wonders in retrospect whether the plague
of boredom would not eventually have afflicted them in Eldorado
as severely as it does in Constantinople. The boredom, as Martin’s
words emphasize, seems to result not from an absence of happiness
but an absence of suffering.