Alceste, the main character in “The Misanthrope”, by Moliere, doesn’t necessarily have a humorous personality, but his actions, especially at the end, provoke “thoughtful laughter” in the reader. The beginning sets up his character as a very narrow-minded person, whose only focus is on one girl. By the end the reader sees how this gets back to Alceste, for the worse. It brings out “thoughtful laughter” when the pompous Alceste flees the city, with nothing left but a lawsuit.
At the end of “The Misanthrope”, Alceste says he want nothing more to do with Celimene. At this point the reader should be full of “thoughtful laughter” because of how Alceste had just contradicted himself from the way he’d been acting for the entire story. For example, in the beginning, the first thing the reader learns about Alceste is that he loathes people in general, the only expectation being the woman he loves: Celimene. In the very next scene Alceste goes on to prove how much he hates just about everything by criticizing Oronte and his poem to the point of being sued.
Towards the middle of the story, Alceste shows how he knows Celimene better than anyone else, and still likes her for it. When Acaste and Clitandre arrive to talk to Celimene, Alceste tires to get them to back off from her. He tries to show them that she isn’t as perfect as they thought she was by having her backstab a lot of other people. Alceste seemingly tricked Celimene into showing her dark side so that he could have her to himself.
In the end, Alceste must flee the city in order to escape his lawsuit. He asks Celimene to join him, but she tells him that while she would marry him, she would only live in the city, living amongst all the fakes that Alceste hates. After hearing this, Alceste goes back on his every word, practically wasting all of his effort he put into getting Celimene, and refuses to see her anymore. In this scene, Moliere showed how foolish and narrow-minded Alceste was. Moliere used his character to satirize the French Society at that time to show how it was full of fakes and hypocrites.
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