s. comes to realize the vampish coquettishness of Celimene that is obvious to the audience all along. But far from acknowledging that his misjudgment may be an index of a flaw in his own character, Alceste retrenches his programmatic misanthropy, isolating himself even further from the society he so vaingloriously despises. Similarly, Arnolphe in School for Wives is just as possessive of Agnes at the end of the play as at the beginning; the only difference is that he loses bodily possession of her. The excessive behavior of Don Juan is legendary. The excessively cynical, impious detachment of Moliere's Don Juan in regard to what he calls love and later excessively expedient adoption of hypocritical respectability are so extreme and so unlikely, in the realistic scheme of things, to remain unpunished that only hell can contain them. As the Statue Don Juan has so cavalierly invited to dinner points out, "obduracy in sin brings on a dreadful death, and Heaven's mercy rejected opens the way to its lightning" (Moliere, Don Juan V.vi). Moliere's Don Juan is a moral caution to the expedientially hypocritical, and as he ends the tale, the audience watches without much sympathy as Don Juan, suddenly stripped of the sham of his courage and with a social or masculine pose of any kind unavailable to him, descends into hell.
Moliere's approach to comedy is to create characters that invite ridicult by remaining stubbornly faithful to their given character traits. If Moliere's characters seem to be flat, flat in this case does not have a pejorative meaning. Moliere's characters succeed in maintaining theatrical illusion because, in all their extremity of personality, they are bound to evoke comic effect. They are reasonable dramatic creations because they represent extreme personalities that are not obliged to change in relation to their situations. They may even accidentally say something useful from time to time. Fatuous old Arnolphe is qui...