The Garden State

   In the last pages of Candide, the characters have finally reached their "Garden State," their place where they can all co-exist relatively happily.  They have finally found their places in life and their roles in their world stretch out long into the future as they settle into what they have decided to do.  In the end, their garden state is not such an extraordinary place.  It is not the city of gold or the castle of Westphalia where nothing bad ever happens.  They find what bliss they can in their small garden behind their modest home.  They work the garden, every member of the household helping in the ways that they can.
   I think this ending is demonstrating how Voltaire was right about the world, not Martin or Candide.  Martin thought people had no free will and their world was governed by the wishes of the devil, forcing everyone to be miserable and do terrible things to each other.  Candide and Pangloss had felt that everything that happened was for the best, no matter how many seemingly terrible things needed to happen to get to that point.  While Pangloss still clings to this belief through the end of the book, I feel as though Candid has begun to truly rethink it.  They end up in a situation that is neither terrible nor wonderful.  They work hard and begin to live a fairly happy life.  They are not being held as slaves or killing or hurting each other, and they are not living in a lavish castle, never knowing a worry or fear.  They land somewhere in the middle, working hard for what they have and enjoying it the best they can.  I think the last line shows Candide's transformation the most.  Throughout the book, when terrible things have happened, Candide has started to doubt his philosophy but has always found a way to justify it in the end.  In these last few lines, however, when Pangloss tells Candide that his theory has been right all along because without all the terrible things that happened they would not have ended up where they are now, Candide shrugs it off.  "That's true enough," he says, "but we must go and work in the garden."  He is not willing to agree wholeheartedly with Pangloss and relish in the joy they are now experiencing due to all the troubles they had to go through before, but he is also not firmly rejecting this theory and stewing in his own misery.  He simply accepts what Pangloss has to say and presses forward in the modest life he has chosen of hard work and average happiness.