Sheep

Sheep enter the narrative as a lost flock whose disappearance becomes part of Pangloss’s explanation of how Candide arrived at his present circumstances. A footnote complicates their apparent identity: the red sheep may be llamas, animals whose usefulness as pack carriers gives the flock a practical as well as symbolic place in the story.

Place in the Narrative

When Pangloss recounts the sequence of events that preceded the companions’ shared meal, he includes Candide’s loss of all his sheep from Eldorado alongside his expulsion from a castle, punishment by the Inquisition, journey across America, and stabbing of the Baron. The flock is thus recalled rather than encountered in this passage: its loss is one link in a retrospective chain that Pangloss presents as leading to their current life.

Pangloss connects the loss to the immediate scene by pointing out that, without those earlier reversals, Candide would not now be eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts. Candide accepts the account only provisionally and turns the exchange toward practical work, answering that they should cultivate their garden. The sheep therefore belong to the story’s history of lost possessions, while their remembered absence helps set Pangloss’s causal optimism against Candide’s emphasis on what the group can do in the present.

Possible Identification

A footnote observes that the red sheep mentioned in the narrative have been thought to refer to the llama, a South American ruminant related to the camel. The identification is presented as a suggestion, not a certainty. The note explains its plausibility by pointing to llamas’ sometimes reddish coloring and their reputation as fleet pack carriers.

That annotation also shifts attention from the label sheep to the animals’ possible material role. If the red sheep are llamas, their significance includes their capacity to carry loads; the evidence does not, however, establish the precise circumstances in which Candide lost the flock. The distinction between the narrative’s name for the animals and the footnote’s proposed identification should therefore remain open.

Narrative Function

The flock is treated through its place in Candide’s fortunes: it is something he possessed and lost, and the loss becomes one more circumstance in Pangloss’s retrospective account. The animals receive no independent action or point of view in the cited passage. Their narrative importance instead lies in the contrast between material usefulness, suggested by the footnote’s account of pack-carrying llamas, and the way their disappearance is absorbed into a philosophical explanation of events.

Candide’s reply redirects that explanation away from the lost flock and toward cultivating the garden. The sheep’s absence consequently marks a limit to Pangloss’s backward-looking chain of causes: the past can be organized into an account, but the companions’ shared work is the response Candide chooses to foreground.