A Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole
Summary
Ignatius J. Reilly is thirty, enormous, educated far past any use he can make of it, and lives with his mother on Constantinople Street in New Orleans, where he writes an indictment of the twentieth century on Big Chief tablets and keeps the pages in boxes under his bed. He has a valve in his stomach that closes whenever the world offends him, which is constantly. He regards Boethius as the last sound thinker in Western history.
His mother drives the car into a building, owes for the damage, and orders him to find work. So Ignatius goes out into the city. At Levy Pants he reorganises the filing system by putting the files in the bin, then leads the factory workers in a crusade that ends in a riot. On a hot dog cart he eats most of the stock.
Around him Toole runs half a dozen other plots that collide at a strip club called the Night of Joy: a bar owner running a pornography racket, a Black janitor paid below the minimum wage who is far smarter than anyone employing him, a patrolman in a series of humiliating disguises, and Myrna Minkoff, Ignatius's radical correspondent in New York, whose letters he answers with insults.
It is a farce with real cruelty in it, and Ignatius is a monster you spend four hundred pages laughing at. The New Orleans speech is the other pleasure: the accents, the shop talk, the aunts.
Best for readers who want a comic novel that is funny out loud, and who can tolerate a hero with no redeeming qualities whatever.
Historical Context & Significance
Published eleven years after its author died, A Confederacy of Dunces won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. John Kennedy Toole finished it in 1963, sent it to Simon and Schuster, and spent two years in correspondence with the editor Robert Gottlieb, who asked for revisions and finally passed. Toole gave up on it, and in 1969, at thirty one, he ran a hose from his car exhaust and killed himself near Biloxi.
His mother Thelma spent years pressing the carbon copy on anyone who would take it, and eventually on the novelist Walker Percy, who was teaching at Loyola in New Orleans and hoped it would be bad enough to put down after a page. Louisiana State University Press published it in 1980 in a small first printing. It has sold more than two million copies in more than a dozen languages, and a statue of Ignatius stands on Canal Street, where the novel opens.
No film has ever been made. Attempts attached to John Belushi, Divine, John Candy, Chris Farley and, under Steven Soderbergh, Will Ferrell all collapsed, several because the intended star died, which New Orleans has settled on calling a curse.