CultureShock's Full Review: John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces: Twen...
One night in the summer of 1986, I was thumbing across the spines of books that sat on a friend's bookcase when one title caught my eye. I pulled the book from its place on the shelf and read the blurb on the back cover. I asked my friend if I could borrow this book. I went home that night and read almost half the novel in my first sitting until I finally fell asleep.
That was the night that I discovered Ignatius J Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. My life has never been the same.
"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that all the dunces are in confederacy against him." This quote by Jonathan Swift has been my mantra, if you will, since high school (I was a little cocky back then and some people would say that I still am).
Ignatius has deluded himself into believing that he truly is a genius in a world of inferior losers, so he embraces a life of intellectual martyrdom. Grossly overweight and saddled with a pyloric valve that just won't stay open, Ignatius waddles his way through the lower working-class neighborhoods of New Orleans. He encounters one brash and crazy character after another on his sojourns.
He moves from one sorry job to the next because his mother Irene has forced him to join the world of gainful employment. Ignatius creates a Communistic workers’ riot at Levy Pants. He is summarily kicked out of the factory and then decides that being a hot dog vendor is palatable, so to say. But he refuses to sell people hot dogs, preferring instead to eat all of them himself.
Ignatius’s mother Irene is a closet drunk who enjoys her bowling nights away from her son. Leaving Ignatius alone with his masturbatory dreams of his long-dead dog is not wise on Irene’s part, but then Irene is not too bright and is ultimately more concerned with getting tanked.
She spends her days talking on the phone to her crazy friend Santa. Santa lends a somewhat sympathetic ear to Irene’s problems with Ignatius, interspersed with violent rantings directed toward her grandchildren. ”’Hold on a minute, Irene. I got one of my little grandchirren over here for the day,’ Santa said and screamed at someone at her end of the line: ‘Get the hell away from that stove, Charmaine, and go play out on the banquette before I bust you right in the mouth.’”
This is a story of an adult man who can’t tear himself away from his needy mother, but we are also led down a path of absurd characters who pop in and out of Ignatius’s life. He sees himself as superior to all of them, and quite frankly he is superior. That’s the scary part. Only the hilarious and smoke-clouded black janitor at the strip joint The Night of Joy ever truly has anything profound to say. Besides Ignatius, the janitor Jones is my favorite character.
Toole's farcical look at the life of a fat pseudo-intellectual man who still lives at home with his lush mother succeeds on every possible level. Facets of social, political, moral, sexual, philosophical, and intellectual theories are slowly and subtly brought to light with each reading. Yes, you will laugh so hard that you'll pull stomach muscles. But A Confederacy of Dunces is so much more than just a funny novel. There are some critical-thought literary reviews on this novel, but not nearly as many as it richly deserves.
Toole's first novel was The Neon Bible (published after A Confederacy of Dunces won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981). It's worth a read, if only to witness Toole's raw genius. But A Confederacy of Dunces was Toole's masterpiece. Toole committed suicide in 1969 after writing these two novels, and his mother was instrumental in introducing the world to Ignatius through her tireless crusade to get her son's work posthumously published.
The textbook, Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole, available in Hardback. Published by: Longleaf Services. Edition: . ISBN10: 0807126063...More at Textbooks.com
Classics Fiction - The best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning classic hailed by The New York Times Book Review as a masterwork . . . the novel astonishe...More at Barnes and Noble
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