Chapter 17 Literary Devices

In chapter 17 there are several literary devices including irony, anaphora, crescendo, and asyndeton. The irony in chapter 17 lies mainly when Cacambo and Candide stumble upon El Dorado and first see young children playing with valuable gems. The children then just leave the gems as if they were pebbles, which is the irony of El Dorado. The El Doradites do not think of these stones, which the rest of the world has placed incalculable value on, to be expensive or even worth anything. "…forgive us for laughing when you offered as payment the pebbles off our roadside." (pg.45) In any other society, paying with valuable stones would more than compensate for anything and people would do just about anything to get their hands on the gems. Anaphora is the repetition of phrases or words at the beginning of consecutive segments. This is shown on page 42 when Candide states, "If I return to my own country, I will find Bulgars and Abars cutting everyone's throats; if I return to Portugal I will be burned at the stake; and if we stay in these parts we may end up on a spit at any moment." The anaphora is present in the "If I…I will…If I…I will" statements. It gives the passage a nice flow and reiterates the central idea in Candide of cause and effect. Another main literary device in chapter 17 is crescendo. The crescendo effect is the subtle (or not so subtle) building up of phrases or words. "…at every turn there were terrible obstacles in the shape of mountains, rivers, precipices, brigands, and savages." (pg. 43) In this case, we see the obstacles building up in terribleness. First Candide mentions the mountains, then escalates to rivers, then precipices (very large cliffs), then brigands (bandits), and finally, which in their opinion could not be worse, savages. It seems as if their travels are getting worse and worse and it is shown by the steady build-up in obstacles they encounter in this specific chapter. Finally, there are traces of asyndeton in chapter 17. The most obvious case occurs on page 43, "Their horses died of fatigue; their provisions ran out; they survived for an entire month on wild fruits…" We can see that conjunctions have been intentionally left out which hurries the idea of the sentence along. It shows, once again, the fast-paced rhythm of the novel.