His beleaguered mother by turns dotes and turns on him in their schizophrenic dance between adult child and aging parent. He spends most of his time waxing melodramatically philosophic, hiding out in the squalor of his bedroom, filling Big Chief writing tablets with his unique brand of Luddite/medievalist/anti-Enlightenment thought and penning incendiary letters to his sex-crazed ex-college-girlfriend Myrna Minkoff. A mountainous college graduate living off his mother's welfare check in her home on one of New Orleans seedy back streets. In his foreword to A Confederacy of Dunces, Percy laments the body of work lost to the world of literature with the author's death, but rejoices 'that this gargantuan tumultuous human tragicomedy is at least made available to a world of readers.'Īt the center of A Confederacy of Dunces is that contemptuous hypochondriac, that deadbeat ideologue, that gluttonous moocher Ignatius Reilly. It was his mother who was responsible for bringing his book to public light, pestering the hell out of Walker Percy, who was teaching at Loyola in 1976, to read it until finally that distinguished author relented. He committed suicide in 1969 at the age of thirty-two. Therein lies the tragedy of this huge and hugely funny book: John Kennedy Toole didn't live to see this now-classic novel published. The Pulitzer committee thought highly enough of Toole's comic prowess to give his only novel the Prize posthumously.

The comedy of A Confederacy of Dunces is writ large in and between its many lines: a grand farce of overeducated white trash, corrupt law enforcement, exotic dancing and the nouveau riche in steamy New Orleans.

A confederacy of dunces book