This is the logical endpoint of Candide's development, along with Martin. Both of them have since abandoned their ideas of a binary world completely. The group has met with misfortune, carried some of its burden into the present (especially Cunegonde), yet they no longer bother with it. Both seek to silence Pangloss's jabbering so that they may pursue the activity they find most pleasurable in a world that seeks to rob pleasure. To literally and figuratively cultivate their garden and carve out not a Utopia by definition, but by their own standards. Life should never be perfect by any standard but one's own, and to pursue happiness in the way it seems to be most available to an individual.

Martin poses the ideas that humans are naturally disposed to create their own miseries. That even in the absence of ill-tidings and poverty, a man will still be "disgusted with all he possesses." It is to this, that Candide challenges Martin's extreme and attempts to find good in the gross example of Pococurante's living space and how he addresses it. That much like philosophizing, striving for improvement and finding fault is a pleasure of its own rather than a complete absence of it. While far too optimistic to be realistic, Candide has grown and is coming to understand that positives can be found in negatives. He has formed an idea of how he will carry himself and a faint reflection of what his future should be like.

The old woman shows herself not to be the opposite of Pangloss, but a much more learned individual. Instead of viewing the world in extremes, she poses to Candide that despite the horrid events of life, one can still make their own reason to live. That the world need not be the best, only that one can find a reason to persist in it. This is a stark contrast to the way Candide viewed occurrences and strokes of bad luck earlier in the story. The old woman has given him tools of nuance with which to understand his place and all that seeks to usurp it with more than a single, oversimplified statement.

At this point, Candide has stopped running figuratively, and literally from the dystopias he has come to face. Beaten, bloody, and broken, much like his previous ideology. The world is acting in much an impossible way to foster any outlook that could be immediately positive and in such quick succession. Candide now has to work to make a new schema. A new outlook and will to survive that at current has been robbed from him. No longer can he turn to Pangloss either for constant advice. Candide is at his lowest point and must claw his way back.

Candide can no longer hide from reality, and at once stops immediately philosophizing about every unfortunate event. Pangloss bearing the bad news about Cunegonde's death forces him to consider that the Earth he stands upon might not be the best of all worlds. At the same time however, he still has not completely developed a sense of reason. Still self-absorbed, he asks Pangloss if a broken heart killed her, to which Candide receives an answer much worse. That in addition to dying, she suffered immensely, having been painfully dismembered in the midst of a battle. It is too much, and even after waking up once again he chooses to ignore it with more immediate matters, such as Pangloss's illness with which to distract himself and potentially recover some of his spoiled mood.

This is the first time Candide thought to revolt against his ideas. In the spur of the moment, his own empathy pushes him to reason that fate is not predetermined. That he can revolt and help improve someone's life just as James had. But Pangloss stops Candide from saving James, and peddles his old reasonings that James needed to drown for the best course of events. On land, such tragedies continue and Candide's cognitive dissonance becomes too great. He begins to ask questions and panic about his own mortality. Going as far as to assert that "The Last Day" has come. That this is not the best of all worlds.

Continuing the theme of learning his place and the absence of a place for idle ideology. Candide fails to encounter generosity in what was spoken to be a land of plenty. Only does this change when someone that is traditionally considered tainted and unfit participate in religious worship, an Anabaptist, come to Candide's aid. Candide misattributes this to the aforementioned perfect world Pangloss told him about. Failing to make the connection that a man, supposedly not good enough to be admitted into the Catholic Church to be a better person than those that are, which compose most of the nearby population. This is the event that marks Candide's slow realization that people like the Anabaptist and the environments they foster are the exception, not the rule.

Language and comparative imagery is erected. Candide is painted to be a coward, expected to be natural of someone that muses about the world but experiences little. Opposite are the "heroes" that take part in battle seemingly fearlessly. Together they create another setting prime to awaken Candide to the horrors of the world. But alas, he fails to confront it, and even after later escaping continues to speak nonsense and rhymes. He as a character still has much to learn to rid himself of his title as a philosopher.

Right out the gate, Candide in this supposedly perfect world is facing torture and humans rights abuses. It is already that Candide is being forced to challenge his assumption of perfect balance and unending fortune. For the first time away from home, he was abducted and nearly slaughtered in cold blood after being impressed into the military. Only by whimsy was he pardoned and treated by a surgeon that he and his ideology survives that encounter. The rest of the world might have been more forgiving, but was just as relentless.

This is the main argument that Voltaire seeks to disprove throughout his text. Pangloss being the vehicle for this statement, he asserts that nothing could ever be anything else because what is current is perfect. Baseline reality is the ideal Utopia. He will continue to maintain this throughout the text with Candide and his friends being his foil. Using worldly experience to disprove heavenly and detached dogma.

Equiano, despite his many recollections of sea travel, had likely been a laborer on land for most of his life up until this point. Relating this to a common public execution method in Europe that was thought humane, doing so on a ship was usually much more difficult. It is said in the text that the man drowned himself to desert and no longer suffer the toils and challenges of seafaring. But in keeping with the theme of public punishment, it was not uncommon to kill a man by keelhauling them. That is, to be hung off the side of the ship in the water to drown or be eaten by hungry sea life by scraping against massive, sharp barnacles and bleeding profusely into the water. Equiano does not relate any such happenings at the time, speaking to how much he has worked on deck compared to an officially employed sailor.

On its own, this should be no surprise. But contrasting it with the architecture of Equiano's village it is. Being a functional society, African people had little use for digging up pretty stones and ornamenting their land with them. Instead, they constructed crude walls and gates to keep out intruders, and small, well-insulated huts to protect themselves from the elements. So too was their land completely unadorned, with the most refined passaged being well-trod pathways cleared of dense vegetation. Europe is in every way an opposite, and has nearly all their architecture neatly carved and composed of uniform material.

On the topic of washing one's hands, this is an interesting topic that unfolded over the course of history. Europe had many great plagues that would wash over the nation quickly, with little done about them aside from burning mountains of corpses. Contrasting this with Equiano's accounts of meticulous handwashing and cleansing, most of the diseases one can acquire within Africa come from wild animals, not from people themselves. Paired with less condensed spaces of living, it is rare that disease would ever wipe out such large swaths of the population. This theme of being dirty and closer to one another continues later through Equiano's early experiences, and serves to lend credence to the hygienic differences in the two cultures.

This goes back to the idea that as one progresses West, one gets closer to a society born of wasteful form, as opposed to a simplistic and resourceful society in the East. Equiano's people had no qualms with taking apart an animal to use each and every last part. Their buildings were lined with animal skins, their containers made from its organs, and all the meats processed to be eaten or stored for later use such as when a famine would strike. Europeans however, came up with terms like "offal" and would throw away anything that was not immediately pleasing. This particular example actually blossomed into a modern issue. As there are some sharks in coastal or island communities that have become endangered because they are caught en-masse, and have their fins severed before being left to bleed out or die of sickness.

Women were sometimes degraded to a level near or as low as children in Western society. It is expected then for this to be taken to a grave extreme to ensure an enslaved woman of a "lesser race" would abide by semi-arbitrary rules. One such rule showcased here was to not speak unless prompted. Yet another is the menial task assigned to her: to cook dinner. While she was busy performing her task, men were likely outside doing rougher work that her master would not suffer her to take on. Lest she do it to a lesser degree of quality than it was believed a man could.

Africa is likely a closed nation that was not yet completely dominated by Europeans, as apartheid had occurred about 200 years after Equiano's time. Thus, unless one were to travel outside of the continent or trade frequently on the coast, European people were nearly completely unheard of. Having no previous reference with which to judge his situation, Equiano falls back on his religion to attempt to make sense of the current situation and why those around him looked so different. Being pale too, it was no wonder Equiano felt they might have been dead. As he likely saw many times, when a corpse is no longer fresh blood falls out of the outer layers of skin and it seems to lose color. Having almost none at all, Equiano reasoned these could be no Earthly beings.

Currency in these functional societies seem to be largely symbolic, with little inherent value placed in the currencies themselves. This is a far cry to the European currencies that are spoken of later in the chapter. Most of them are made of metals with their value tied to some store of wealth or are largely evident of wealth on their own. The best example of this is Sterling. The currency was made with a blend of copper and silver, making the coins universally valuable as opposed to using them purely for regulation of goods and services.

Something Equiano did not compare to Islamic religions was Bigamy. In Europe he saw many monogamous couples that would take him in as a servant, but very rarely would there be multiple wives. If my memory serves me, any one man can marry up to three women, but the case is not so for women. This one sided polygamy gets more and more common the deeper into the middle east one travels. It is not surprising then that similar traditions made their way into a close or connecting nation.

This coincides with a few of the general tenements of Judeo-Islam-Christian religions. That there is a singular creator, and he has sway over the earth and its inhabitants. Closer still does this approach earlier religions where the universe was said to be finite and contain divine beings in heavenly spheres. Lastly, it mirrors the notion that to some there is an afterlife to quarter oneself in with the help of one's god. However, it is noted later that the spirit plane, as opposed to being in the heavens, is parallel to that of the living and contains guardian spirits as opposed to souls petitioning god and his angels to bless their living family with good fortune.

This is likely a sign of an untouched society developing to value function over form. The Europeans and all their colonies are a far cry from this. As most women that were not enslaved would not begin to be considered for combat. It was, for the longest time and even still to some degree in western civilization, that women are to stay home and take care of the children and duties around the house. Comparatively, African society is more flexible in this regard and allows for everyone to take part in everything. In fact, it is likely encouraged they do to achieve peak efficiency and live off the land where no terraforming has ripped apart the land to make it blatantly favorable for farming until the nutrients completely vacate the soil.