Book Review and Analysis: A Confederacy of Dunces

Comedy is truth and pain. Within that concept lives A Confederacy of Dunces, the 1981 Pulitzer Prize winning classic comedy by John Kennedy Toole. The award was given to Toole posthumously due to his unfortunate suicide in 1969. The book was published thanks to feverish lobbying by Toole’s mother to local college professor and writer Walker Percy. After reluctantly reading the manuscript Toole’s mother found at home, Percy was astounded and Louisiana State University Press finally published the work eleven years after his death.

The book follows quite possibly the most offensive in behavior, grotesque in appearance and generally unlikable protagonist in all of literature. Ignatius J. Reilly is an obese, flatulent man-child with an outdated worldview and an unpopular notion for what he considers taste and decency. His womb-like isolationism and misanthropy are fueled by early medieval writings, most notably The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. To top things off, Ignatius is a delusional, paranoid, hypochondriac with questionable hygiene despite spending hours in the bathtub as a cathartic means to cleanse him of the horrors and perversions of modern society.

So what is there to like about this anti-hero? Well, he contrasts his mountain of flaws with an uber-educated mind filled with passion for social equality and imparting his knowledge of theology and geometry by writing countless diatribes upon Big Chief tablets scattered amongst his sloth’s den of a bedroom.

Ignatius’s greatest sympathetic trait is his overwhelming sense of societal alienation. His loneliness is not caused by lack of family or community, despite his complaints he loves both his uneducated mother and his degenerate home city of New Orleans. Instead, the heaviest weight Ignatius carries on his hulking back is the struggle for acceptance in an era that he feels he does not belong. The manifestation of this pain is his pyloric valve, which, amongst other gastrointestinal ailments, opens and shuts depending on his emotional state.

Toole masterfully uses Ignatius as an unlikely spokesman for the foibles and contradictions mankind boasts regardless of race, creed or class. He carefully dissects the troubled marriage of an aristocratic couple, the bleak road for a vagrant black man, the power struggles of a skid row pornographer, the shortcomings of an impotent law official, the fanciful ideology of a homosexual socialite, the hollow antics of an audience-less banner waver, the tired eyes of a senile woman, the hopelessness and regret of an aging mother, and the burning desire for stability of a politically-paranoid old crank.

The relationships that carry this lampoon of humanity are cemented by each character’s eternal struggle for respect and appreciation. The absurdity of mankind’s insistence on taking itself seriously is a subject that permeates the book as Toole skewers various institutions through Ignatius’s blue and yellow eyes.

Vices, such as Mrs. Reilly’s alcoholism, guilty pleasures, such as Ignatius’s desire to watch every repugnant film that Hollywood dare make, and the “born into this” damnation of Burma Jones’s vagrancy or Mr. Levy’s commercial albatross, all add to the fragility of the characters.

Toole brilliantly analyzes the human condition and embellishes its nuisances for comedic value. He then weaves his unique tale into a Larry David-esque story-web where each character is interconnected and no one’s actions are spared in affecting the outcomes of their neighbor’s.

In the end, the most personal and heart-breaking aspect of reading Toole’s Crescent City Greek tragedy is the unavoidable connections between Ignatius’s personal struggles and his creator’s. Toole was seemingly writing for no one, he spent two years attempting to publish this book before taking his own life and Ignatius feels a similar burden. Ignatius’s mother, frustrated by seeing her son waste his education by writing in a vacuum of sorts sums up his work as, “Some foolishness nobody never gonna feel like reading” (p. 213).

Ironically, Mrs. Reilly’s defeatist sentiment is precisely why we should read A Confederacy of Dunces. Being able to relate to Ignatius’s feelings of anomie is where I believe readers will either find great humor and enjoyment in the misadventures or find themselves left out on the grand joke within its message.

Luckily for Toole, his own mother blessed us with his work and we should all feel like reading it. Maybe it’s better to be unable to relate to the truth and pain of this hilarious book, but I’m glad the world has it for those of us that do.