A Confederacy of Dunces

Oh, Ignatius. You would be thriving in the 21st century - a marble statue avi with 50k followers, no doubt.

This didn't crack me up quite as much as it did when I first read it 10 years ago (perhaps on account of the way the world has since been Reilly-ified), but that's okay. Toole captured such a real and distinct type of Guy in a perfect, crystalized form. Like Carl Linnaeus at a Carl's Jr., he offers a taxonomy of the pseudo-intelligent boor of North America we're all too familiar with.

The novel's star is just the beginning of the author's ability to capture life on the fringes. Street toughs, radicals, vagrants, and queers wend through the streets of New Orleans and weave into the story for brief but memorable appearances. Whether show more high status or low, most characters are too sweaty, too tired, too sapped by the Louisiana heat to really care about whatever is going on. Relatable. show less

Virtually impossible to put down, once you get into the rhythm of the dialogue and start to hear the language with the right ear for the time and place. Ignatius Reilly is one of the great comic creations, but all the characters are perfectly formed. Their are basically 5 interlocking plots weaved into the narrative. 1) The enormous, pompous, grotesque Ignatius, overflowing with ideas, gas, fat and invective is forced to try to find work at the advanced age of 30, whilst engaging in long distance badinage with his friend Myrna Minkoff, who’s libertarian behaviour purports to shock but actually attracts him. A job as a hot dog vendor merely adds to his enormous girth, for easily discernible reasons 2) His long suffering, somewhat show more alcoholic mother falls into a friendship with Santa Battaglia who schemes to get her married off, and Ignatius sent to a psychiatric ward 3) The vissitudes of the Levy family, owners of Levy Pants, a downwardly mobile concern unwise enough to employ Ignatius for a short period 4) The Night of Joy a down at heel bar / cathouse that includes the funniest Blonde + Cockatoo strip act in literature and the ascerbic Burma Jones, forced to work at the Night to avoid charges of vagrancy and 5) Patrolman Mancuso forced by his vengeful Sergeant to patrol the French Quarter in ever more ridiculous costumes to try to entrap homosexuals.

Any one of these 5 plot threads could have been a novel of its own. Each plot thread intersect with each other as Ignatius attempts to find salvation.

One of the criticisms of the book that hindered its original publication is that the book “isn’t really about anything” and is little more than a panorama of early sixties New Orleans. There is some truth to this perhaps, but so perfect are the characters that it doesn’t matter. If you haven’t read it - and it took me a long while to get to it - please do so show less

I recently reread this book and I don’t think it held up all that well. Or maybe I’ve changed. In our current age, a story about a person who is completely deluded and fabricates stories that they insist are truth just isn’t funny. Further, Ignatius’s mother is portrayed as if she is not very smart and she has a lot of histrionic responses. However, in this read through, Ignatius doesn’t come off to me as a bumbling fool, rather as a gaslighting misanthrope. I felt that his mom was actually a victim, not an exaggerating, object of ridicule.
Every time a character believed what Ignatius said, I just felt irritated all over again. Finally the casual racism doesn’t sit well.

Man I love this book, Ignatius J Reilly is a true visionary and one of the most memorable characters ever created in the history of literature. It is an outright hilarious account of his trials and tribulations while finding his way through a series of jobs. He does as little work as possible and seeds discord behind him like an infection, all the time railings against personal injustices and modern values. “I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip” and “Apparently I lack some particular perversion which today's employer is seeking. ” There are several other colourful characters that he encounters in a lurid show more multicultural New Orleans of dumbass police officers, naive stripclubs dancers, sarcastic janitors and failed hot dogs vendors. I am sure to read this book again and again till my dying day. show less

"A Confederacy of Dunces" was awkward and offensive, but in a hilarious and whimsical manner rather than a purposeful one. On a personal note, my writing style is similar to Toole's because we both use ridiculous metaphors: "...his scarf-shawl flying horizontally in his wake like the flag of some mobilized Scottish clan." Other than living in the Gulf region, few other parallels exist, as I haven't committed suicide and trusted my mother to sell posthumous manuscripts of my work. The book deliciously captures the Southern aristocrat within us all, as each character confronts someone even lower than themselves in the complex social structure of 1960's New Orleans. The variety of characters Toole caricatures gives a comic flair to show more otherwise harsh stereotypes and scenarios sure to make even the most mature reader wince and fidget once or twice. show less

I was introduced to A Confederacy of Dunces in college. Whilst there, I managed to read about half of it. Over the years I've read the first half several more times. For reasons I can't quite explain, I never finished. Each time when I paused, I ended up pausing too long and when I came around to it again, I just decided to start over. Part of it is because the writing is so good I never tired of re-reading the bits I'd already read. Part of it was because the main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, is so tragic and comic and ironic and wonderful and repulsive and fascinating and terrifying and, oh what's the word I'm looking for? Falstafian. Yes, all of that. I think I was afraid of what the second half of the book held in store for show more him.

During our New Year's sojourn to Kansas City, while we had 17 hours in the car (x 2), we brought along this book to read, much like we did In Cold Blood and To Kill a Mockingbird during previous trips. I think we got about half-way through in the car, funny enough, just about to where I usually stop reading, before the allure of the iPod and its thousands of hours of music called us in a different direction for our driving entertainment.

So I brought it with me on my latest trip to Kansas City, because I like reading on planes (it makes the time go by faster) and I really wanted to finish it, once and for all. I was at a point where I needed to know what Ignatius did after he left the Levy Pants company. Well, for those of you who don't know, he goes to work as a hot-dog vendor, pushing a hot-dog shaped cart through the street of New Orleans with a hand drawn sign taped to the front reading, "12 inches of pleasure." He then tries to rally the French Quarter gay community into a political group that will infiltrate the military and effectively stop war because gay people only want to party. He then tries to rescue an imaginary ingenue from a strip club because he saw his favorite book by Boethius sitting next to her in some contraband school-girl porn. The story goes on and on until its hilarious end. Why, oh why, haven't I read it before?

It's hard to say what I liked best about this book. The story itself is fantastic. The characters are all rich in detail if lacking just a bit in back-story. The writing, especially the voice, is perfect for this sort of satire. The narrator never once breaks through that fourth wall and says what we're all thinking, that Ignatius is off his rocker. Instead he goes along with the gag completely and inevitably.

The author, John Kennedy Toole, killed himself shortly after finishing this book, what he considered his masterpiece, after it was rejected at least once for publication. His mother then shopped it around for years before finally getting it published. Toole was awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously. I imagine him now sitting in the heavenly equivalent of Constantinople Street watching The Yogi Bear Program with his famous invented character.

By the way, the title refers to a quote from Jonathan Swift: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." It took fifteen years for someone to publish this book? The dunces were in confederacy Indeed. show less

Decades before incels, internet trolls, and Serge Storms (Tim Dorsey), there was Ignatius Reilley. Oversized, odious, malicious, dishonest and narcissistic, overtly intelligent and well educated, insightful and tragic.
The archetype for deadbeat edgelord 300 pound single 30 year olds still living with their mom, lonely and angry at the world, superior to everyone yet rejected by society, the ultimate anti-hero.

This is a brilliant book, timeless, cutting, and overflowing with darkly satirical humour. The desperation and despondency of the author (the book was published posthumously many years after his suicide) seep through the text, adding a layer of emotional realism that grounds the often farcical plot. The parallels of the late show more 1960's to the early 2020's are striking and prescient, including race relations, workplace drama, politics, LGBT rights, homelessness, etc. It's a remarkably relatable world, but discouraging that we haven't made more progress. show less