A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

First published: 1980

Type of plot: Epic comedy

Time of work: The early 1960’s

Locale: New Orleans

Principal Characters:

• Ignatius J. Reilly, the comic protagonist, an obese, self-important, failed scholar in medieval studies and commentator on the deficiencies of the modern world
• Irene Reilly, his mother, a widow and closet drinker
• Myrna Minkoff, his erstwhile girlfriend, who has continued to remain in touch with him through letter writing, now a radical in New York City
• Angelo Mancuso, a comic policeman in search of “suspicious characters”
• Claude Robichaux, Mrs. Reilly’s elderly suitor, worried about Communists
• Lana Lee, the owner of the Night of Joy bar, a part-time pornographer
• Burma Jones, a black porter at the Night of Joy, Lana’s constant critic
• Darlene, a B-girl at the Night of Joy
• Gus Levy, president of Levy Pants, Ignatius’s employer
• Mrs. Levy, the dissatisfied wife of Mr. Levy
• Miss Trixie, a senile employee at Levy Pants

The Novel

The action of A Confederacy of Dunces blends such disparate elements as ribald farce, sophisticated intellectual and social satire, and realistic examination of the speech and customs of ethnic New Orleans. Binding these elements together is the magnetic figure of Ignatius J. Reilly, a grossly fat, thirtyish mama’s boy and failed medieval scholar who is convinced of his own genius and of the fact that “the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” Ignatius is eager to condemn any product of modern culture and technology for its “offenses against taste and decency,” its “lack of theology and geometry,” often while he is in the act of consuming it.

As the novel begins, Ignatius, a former graduate student whose one halfhearted attempt to secure a teaching position ended in a disaster that confirmed his low opinion of the modern world, is forced to go to work by his doting, alcoholic, weak-willed, but exasperated mother, who is fed up after years of supporting his “career” as a “writer.” Having caused a public disturbance in the novel’s first scene because of his outlandish dress and behavior, Ignatius bellows at the investigating patrolman, Angelo Mancuso, in his pompous diction, “Is it the part of the police department to harass me when this city is a flagrant vice capital of the civilized world?” His instinct is to shift blame in every circumstance and to retreat from modernity into his ivory tower—his smelly, disordered bedroom. There he is composing, on lined Big Chief tablets at a rate of “six paragraphs monthly,” what he is sure will be “a magnificent study in comparative history” exploring how, “with the breakdown of the Medieval system, the gods of Chaos, Lunacy and Bad Taste gained ascendancy.” Quick to condemn disorder and bad taste in others, Ignatius never sees them in himself. He hoots at sex, marriage, a career, industrialization, the profit motive, and American Bandstand as gross excrescences of modern culture, but of the lot he prefers American Bandstand, which he watches every afternoon, chortling at its offenses in a loud voice.

Yet, as Ignatius often says, “the rota Fortunae, or wheel of fortune,” turned against him when his mother forced him to leave his room and seek work. With his retreat cut off, he goes on the attack. He takes a job as clerk for the failing Levy Pants company. There he performs his filing duties so easily (by throwing the documents in the trash) that he has ample energy to “improve” the company in other ways, all of which glorify Ignatius. Ultimately, in one of the novel’s great comic scenes, he decides to prove his talent as a revolutionary to his former girlfriend Myrna Minkoff (who is in New York advocating sexual liberation) by leading the plant’s unimpressed black factory workers on a “Crusade for Moorish Dignity” against the meek office manager, Mr. Gonzalez, using a stained bedsheet as their banner. The factory workers want wage increases; Ignatius wants violence for the fun of it. His exploit results in comic failure, and, after he is fired, Fortune’s wheel sinks him a notch lower; he takes a job as a hot dog vendor.

Meanwhile, two other major (and several minor) lines of action have been set in motion. His mother, Irene, has developed friendships with Patrolman Mancuso, the officer who attempted to arrest Ignatius in the novel’s first scene, and Claude Robichaux, an elderly but solvent suitor who finds Communists lurking behind every chair. These new friends, to the disgust of Ignatius, who exclaims, “It’s not your fate to be well treated,” succeed in getting his mother out of the house for the first time in years. They take her bowling and to films and in the process gradually convince her that Ignatius is crazy and that her path to happiness is to marry Robichaux, whom her son treats with contempt, and have Ignatius put away in an insane asylum.

The other major story thread in this novel full of such traditional devices of comic plotting as parallel action, coincidence, and mistaken identity involves the Night of Joy bar, where Ignatius and his mother fled after their early brush with the law. Lana Lee, the voluptuous but mean-spirited proprietress, is running a shady operation that relies on B-girls and watered-down drinks. Business is bad, and on the side she generates cash by selling pornographic pictures of herself to schoolboys. Working in the bar are Burma Jones, a black porter whom Lana cannot fire despite his stinging diatribes because he is working for a mere twenty dollars a week to avoid a vagrancy charge, and Darlene, a pretty and good-natured but dumb blonde whose one ambition is to be an exotic dancer. Ignatius is led into the bar by a chain of circumstances on the night of Darlene’s dance-act debut. The result is the novel’s climax, a comic debacle that finds Ignatius lying unconscious in the street while Patrolman Mancuso, under pressure to find “suspicious characters,” makes a dramatic arrest of Lana Lee on vice charges. When the story and pictures hit the morning papers, an angry and humiliated Mrs. Reilly decides that she must have Ignatius put away. In the novel’s final scene, however, one sees Ignatius escaping to fresh adventures with the lately returned Myrna Minkoff, while the wagon coming to take him away passes by. To the end he remains resilient, unshakably convinced of his own genius and the duncehood of others.

The Characters

Ignatius, the undefeated, stands at the center of a matrix of comic failures. These are vivid, if flat, characters who escape being mere stereotypes because of Toole’s genius for telling gesture and individualized dialect. Each character has learned about defeat in his own way, yet few have submitted to it. They are almost pathetic, but not quite. Mr. Clyde, the much put-upon owner of the understaffed Paradise Vendors (and Ignatius’s future employer in the hot dog business), is bitterly aware that “nobody respects a hot dog vendor,” and he describes his own product containing “rubber, cereal, tripe. Who knows? I wouldn’t touch one of them myself.” Yet when Ignatius tries to escape without paying, after wolfing down several Paradise franks, Mr. Clyde seizes a serving fork and, pressing it against Ignatius’s throat, induces him, in lieu of payment, to come to work selling weenies. Almost all of Toole’s characters will seize even a mediocre opportunity if it presents itself.

When Angelo Mancuso botches his first attempt as an investigator (instead of arresting Ignatius he is egged on by accusations of being a Communist to arrest the respectable Mr. Robichaux), his disgusted sergeant sends him to search for “suspicious characters” in ludicrous costumes (for example, a T-shirt, bermuda shorts, and long red beard) and forces him to endanger health and sanity by spending whole days on stakeout in public rest rooms, but Mancuso persists and finally triumphs.

The denizens of the Night of Joy bar are equally persistent, but the efforts of its proprietress, Lana Lee, are defeated by the very dishonesty and inhumanity on which she relies in her quest for success. An object of continual satire, she complains that “business stinks,” but she is rude to customers and her bar is dark, dirty, and bad smelling. She will not pay her porter, Burma Jones, enough to motivate him to clean it really properly. As the B-girl Darlene complains,

I only work on commission for how much I get people to drink. You think that’s easy? Try to get some guy to buy more than one of the kinda drinks they serve here. All water. They gotta spend ten, fifteen dollars to get any effect at all.

Darlene, the novel’s purest stereotype—the dumb blonde—aspires to rise from her form of servitude by becoming an exotic dancer. She works up a clumsy strip act involving her pet parrot that contributes to the comic denouement. Jones, one of the novel’s funniest and freshest characters as well as its major black voice, is as notable for his intelligent anger as for the unschooled energy of his speech. Screened behind dark glasses and clouds of cigarette smoke, Jones takes savage delight in speaking his mind against a system that exploits and cheats him. “Hey!” he says, “I’m workin in modren slavery. If I quit, I get report for being vagran. If I stay, I’m gainfully employ on a salary ain even startin to be a minimal wage.” Jones’s cheerful efforts at “sabotage” help to destroy the evil Lana and ultimately lead both Darlene and himself to better jobs.

Irene Reilly is another character who seems to be beaten but who refuses to submit to defeat. When Mrs. Reilly at last recognizes that the cause of her poverty and unhappiness is her own son and that her only hope for a better life is to have her “boy genius” put away and marry the dim-witted but kind Mr. Robichaux, she reluctantly but firmly decides to do so (and the novel makes clear that she has made the right choice).

The only characters who have really given up are the ones with the least reason, Gus Levy, the affluent proprietor of Levy Pants, and his wife, Mrs. Levy. Gus has given up on the pants business because his father, when he was alive, would not try any of Gus’s ideas. Now that his father is dead, Gus has chosen to get revenge by running the business into the ground. Mrs. Levy has given up on her husband and turned their daughters against him because of his deliberate business failure. She is a woman of causes, but her judgment is invariably misplaced. She sees Ignatius’s ill-fated “Crusade for Moorish Dignity” as the act of a “young idealist,” and she condemns Gus for firing him. She also insists on attempting to rejuvenate the vividly drawn Miss Trixie, the company’s senile, oldest employee. Miss Trixie, whose only wish is to retire, symbolized the present senility of Gus’s company. She must be replaced if Gus is to prosper, but Mrs. Levy, congratulating herself for her insight and kindness, will not let the poor woman quit.

It takes the machinations of Ignatius, who sends a hostile letter to Levy Pants’s best customer over Gus Levy’s signature, a letter that occasions a potentially disastrous lawsuit, to shake Mr. Levy out of his lethargy. He ends the novel in a newly energetic frame of mind, ready to take his business in hand.

In the end, the good characters are rewarded and the evil punished through the workings of an intricate plot whose models extend back from P. G. Wodehouse to Molière and Geoffrey Chaucer to Plautus. Toole has created a very traditional comic structure. Despite its biting satire and its modern setting, the novel is in no sense a black comedy. Positive, traditional values are exemplified through the action of characters and the unfolding coincidences of the plot.

Critical Context

The story of the way Toole’s novel came before the public is a strange one, involving frustration, tragedy, and posthumous triumph. Toole completed the book in 1963, but, after extended negotiations with one publisher came to nothing in 1966, he made no further attempt to publish it. In 1969, Toole committed suicide. Eventually, through the persistence of his mother, the novel was brought to the attention of novelist Walker Percy, who secured its publication in 1980. The book became a best-seller, an almost unanimous success with critics, a nominee for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the winner of the 1981 Pulitzer Prize.

It has been praised for its comic structure, its brilliant use of dialogue, and its evocation of the setting and language of New Orleans. Most of all, critics have found it extremely amusing. They have hailed Toole as a comic genius, comparing his work favorably to that of the greatest comic and satiric writers, including Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Charles Dickens, and Miguel de Cervantes. Critics have regretted that Toole’s career was so tragically short. A Confederacy of Dunces has been recognized as a unique comic masterpiece, a book that successfully combines high and low comedy, realism and fantasy, with irresistible high spirits and sheer narrative drive.

Bibliography

Britton, Wesley A. “Two Mississippi Views on Medievalism and Determinism: Mark Twain and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.” Southern Quarterly 34 (Fall, 1995) 17-23. Britton compares Toole’s Ignatius J. Reilly and Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, Hank Morgan, along with some of Twain’s other medieval characters. Britton demonstrates how both authors use their characters as voices for their own philosophical attitudes toward medieval determinism.

Fennell, Barbara A., and John Bennett. “Sociolinguistic Concepts and Literary Analysis.” American Speech 66 (Winter, 1991): 371-379. A study of Toole’s manipulation of sociolinguistic factors to establish the outsider status of Ignatius J. Reilly. Fennel and Bennett show how Reilly uses speech to create social distance and how he violates maxims of conversation that require speakers to be truthful, informative, relevant, clear, and polite.

MacKethan, Lucinda H. “Redeeming Blackness: Urban Allegories of O’Connor, Percy, and Toole.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 27 (Fall, 1994): 29-39. MacKethan focuses on Catholic novelists O’Connor, Percy, and Toole and their use of religious allegory to explore modern ills. She notes that all three use the city as the nexus of modern life and the unavoidable destination of those suffering from alienation.

Rudnicki, Robert W. “Toole’s Proboscis: Some Effluvial Concerns in The Neon Bible.” The Mississippi Quarterly 47 (Spring, 1994): 221-236. Compares Toole’s first novel, The Neon Bible, with A Confederacy of Dunces. Rudnicki asserts that the novels share similar themes but portray them in different ways. The Neon Bible is tragic and deals with the growth and maturation of a boy, while A Confederacy of Dunces is satiric and tells of an adult’s desire to regain his childhood. Both novels share the theme of decay of formally unspoiled values.

Simon, Richard K. “John Kennedy Toole and Walker Percy: Fiction and Repetition in A Confederacy of Dunces.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 36 (Spring, 1994): 99-116. Observes that Toole’s novel is a fictional reflection on Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1961) and Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy. Simon notes that as Percy’s novel was itself a reflection on Søren Kierkegaard’s notion of repetition, Toole addresses the issue as well in his novel.