Gulliver's Life Of Olaudah Equiano: Character Analysis

Three of the works that we have read have been Gulliver’s Travels, Candide, and The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. The three have been widely different in their approach, but they all come back to the theme of a corrupt, evil, narrow-minded society that the main character believes should be fixed. Through all their journeys, the characters show us that through perspective we can see the necessary changes that need to be made to society. Of the three, I believe that Gulliver’s Travels is the best because it offers an outside view and opinion of our society from the Houyhnhnms that is not available in the other stories. In The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, we follow a young man through his struggles
Candide follows the story of Candide and Cunegonde and their struggles to find one another in a problematic society. Candide and Martin are almost constantly debating on the topic of evil, where Pangloss and Cunegonde are out in the world experiencing some of the most horrible evils that society has to offer. In the story the characters witness or are subject to a wide variety of horrors—floggings, rapes, robberies, unjust executions, disease, an earthquake, betrayals, and more. These horrors are the result of the author questioning religion, the concept of utopia, and satirizing the responses that the religious give for why humans are made to face such horrors in life. By the end of the story, I found myself to believe that evil was both of creation and circumstance; there is evil in the world, but whether it effects one person or not is subject to fate and how the individual views life’s many situations. Though Voltaire sets up what could very well be one of my favorite stories, there is a view of a corrupt society and a view of a whimsical utopia, there is no rational voice in the middle of the two conflicting societal
This perspective leads the reader to not just believe a society is misaligned, but wrong all together and in need of being mended at once. Voltaire asks of his readers whether evil is of creation or of fate and individual perspective, and while we all have our differing opinions and will never know the “correct” answer, we should strive for a utopia of our own, not a whimsical one, but a reasonable, logical