A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
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Book Reviews of A Confederacy of Dunces
Book Review: It was the best of books, it was the worst of books
Summary: 5 Stars
I have looked through many of these reviews, and no one has yet explained why many reviewers think it is the best book ever, and many think it is the worst book ever. Here is my attempt.
Why some people laugh till they choke
Ignatius is a physical comedian. He follows in the tradition of Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, the Victorian classic "Three Men in a Boat, to say nothing of the dog," the Marx brothers, the Pink Panther movies ("The Return of the Pink Panther" is the best), and Mr. Bean. So if you laughed uncontrollably at Chief Inspector Dreyfus's facial tick because he wanted to kill Clouseau, if you laughed when Chaplin kicked the policeman in the pants and ran, or when Mr. Bean accidentally popped a bag of vomit over a sleeping passanger's face, then you are more likely to enjoy this book. It also helps if you were an obedient student and learned all those vocabulary words in English class, because Ignatius is a very learned, pompous slapstick comedian.
What proof do I have of this? Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean) once made a documentary about the aspects of physical comedy (made in 1992, the TV series was called "Funny Business," the episode was called "Laughing Matters", the relevant sections on Youtube are parts 4 and 5). In that lecture, he said that the personality traits of the physical comedian are the following.
1. He is alienated from the society around him: Ignatius stays in his room in his mother's house.
2. He is childish: Ignatius thinks his mother should still support him at age 30.
3. He has to fight with ordinary objects: Ignatius cannot even ride in a bus.
4. His body can be humorous by itself: Did I mention Ignatius is obese?
5. He is uncivilized and cannot or will not conform to social rules: Ignatius's first act in the book is to hit a policeman in the head with a rolled up sheet of music.
6. He is a threat to respectable people: On first seeing him, the policeman immediately tries to arrest him. Even a strip-tease club wants to get rid of him.
7. He mocks authority and politeness: Ignatius is rude and heaps scorn on everyone.
8. He spreads confusion: Ignatius causes the climactic chaos of the book.
9. ... I cannot tell you the ninth quality without giving away the ending. But the book conforms to it as well.
Why some people hate the book
While there has been some smirking and name calling, it is obvious that some who hate the book are quite literate and are not at all dunces. ACoD haters include those who say they like Catch-22, Ground Hog's Day, and other humor classics. Remember, many publishers rejected it, and even Walker Percy didn't realize it was good until about page 50. Most good books sparkle long before that point. Why are its qualities sometimes hard to see?
Although Ignatius is a physical comedian, his humor is not lightning fast like Charlie Chaplin or the Marx brothers. It is hard to quote a funny line, because each line in isolation isn't that funny. They are only funny in the total context of the story. Catch-22 is a book that is hundreds of pages of variations of the same joke. If you liked the basic joke, you love the book. If you hated the joke, you hate the book. With ACoD, if you recognize Ignatius as a slow-burning physical comedian early on--and you find his stately slapstick funny--you will love every page of the book. If you either fail to get the character at all or do not find his version of slapstick funny, you will hate the book.
The book was the first attempt to publish by the author, and it is bit rough. The repetition of metaphors and phrases can be annoying, especially if you are not already laughing. Ignatius is described by animal metaphors repeatedly. He says the same phrases repeatedly. There are very few one-liners by any of the characters. The complicated multi-story plot unfolds slowly. If you are not already in on the joke while this is going on, it is painful. If you are, it is delicious. That is my explanation for the love/hate reviews.
A further theory
I am writing a scholarly article about this book. I have searched the scholarly literature high and low and have not found any other writings on my idea. I have thought about explaining my main concept here, to establish a claim of priority, but I have decided against it. Instead, I will give a brief explanation of a side claim, to demonstrate some of the drift of my thinking. So here it goes.
Ignatius complains throughout the book about Fortune's Wheel. In medieval thinking, everyone was attached to a wheel of fortune. Sometimes you were up and had good fortune; other times you were spun down into ill fortune. Good things happen to bad people and vice versa, so luck does not follow worldy ideas of justice. Or to put it plainly: Life ain't fair.
But in the book, Ignatius himself acts as fortune's wheel. When he arrives at the Night of Joy the second time, Lana and George are in good fortune, and Burma Jones and Darlene have ill fortune. Through Ignatius, their luck is reversed. When Ignatius appears at Levy Pants, Mrs. Levy is controlling both Mr. Levy and Miss Trixie. Through Ignatius, Mr. Levy gets the upper hand, Mrs. Levy has lost power, and Miss Trixie can finally retire. This spherical man acts as a catalyst, spinning the fortunes of the other characters. When Mancuso first interacts with Ignatius, his luck turns bad, but in the end, Mancuso has triumphed, and Lana is off to prison, where she will need some consolation of philosophy.
Boethius wrote in the Consolation of Philosophy that fortune hands out luck that we cannot understand in this world, but which is part of the overall plan of divine justice. Instead of divine justice, Ignatius rolls his circular form through the world, and in his farcical chaos he rights wrongs of this world and brings worldy, poetic justice to the characters. He is fortune's wheel.
Note from December 2008: In the article by Richard Simon (1994). "John Kennedy Toole and Walker Percy: Fiction and repetition in A Confederacy of Dunces." Texas Studies in Literature & Language, 36(1), page 113, in a footnote, Simon argues that Ignatius represents Fortuna herself. My claim is slightly different: that Ignatius is her wheel.
Book Review: My 8th graders daughter's class speech told as Irene
Summary: 5 Stars
Here it is:
A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES
Now, I bet none of you chirrin ever known a person so useless as my son Ignatius. He's a very smart boy, ya know, but he doesn't do nothin' for his poor mamma, an' he's already thirty years by now!
Well, anyway, I'm Irene Reilly, one of them stars in A Confederacy of Dunces. The nice man who written it is John Kennedy Toole. Now, this book is all about poor Ignatius and me, and it starts when we go off to the doctor to check my darn arthuritis elbow. I go in there alone an after buyin' us some food, I see my poor son is bein harrassed by some po-lice man for no good reason! Well after we get outta there an have a couple a brandys at the Night of Joy, I accidently hit a building with that darn car! An we did a thousand twenty dollars of damage! So then I tells Ignatius he gotta get hisself a job because there is NO way we is gonna be able to pay that off. All he does is sit in his ol' bedroom writin' things, so I'm thinkin' he oughta use his time good, ya know?
So my baby goes an gets hisself a job as one of them office people at Levi Pants. I like him havin' a real job an' all, but he shoulda gotten a better one, given all the college he been through. He meeted a real nice ol' lady called Miss Trixie there, an' all she wanted is to retire! There's a lil' bit of her story in that book, too.
So, Ignatius somehow gets hisself fired from that place, somethin' about gettin' the factory workers to revolt an' writin' a mean letter to a custermer. Then he gets hisself a position sellin' hotdogs! An' for this darn job, he wore hisself a pirate costume! Can you chirrin imagine how embarrasin that was for his poor mamma?
Now, bout this time, my friend Santa hooked me up with a nice man called Claude, an' he's way rich enough to get us a thousand twenty real easy. I like him okay, but I jus dunno. Ignatius have a girlfriend once called Myrna, an' them two send letters still. I hoped they get together sometime.
Now, this ain't all that happenin' in that book. Poor Ignatius gets in real trouble with Levi Pants, an' they try an' track him down! An' then he gets hisself mixed up with an orphan carryin' mystery packages! There's also parts in that story about them people workin' at that Night of Joy bar, that po-lice officer that tried to arrest my boy, Mr. an' Mrs. Levi, an' o'course, all them other troubles Ignatius gets hisself into! Now, I can' go round tellin' you chirrin the whole story! But I will tell you that near that end, my friend Santa is tryin' to get me to marry Claude an' send my Ignatius to that Charity Hospital. An, my poor boy gets hisself attacked by a canary at the bar! You is gonna have to read that book to find it out about all that excitin stuff!
Anyways, I like that book jus' because it seem so funny to people, how Ignatius get hisself in so many troubles. There is a lot a differen' people stories in there, an' that keeps it real interestin'. The real challengin' bit of that book was understandin' poor Ignatius's journal, because he uses all sorts a big words, ya know.
Well, anyway, I gonna read ya jus the beginning of that book, an I love that part because it describes my poor Ignatius so well. Here we go... (in book)
Anyway, if I got to give that book a ratin' from one to ten, I would give it a nine. I like this one a lot jus because its so funny. I recommend it to all you, but you oughta be warned there are some things in that book that you maybe shouldn't be readin as such young chirrin.
This story takes place in New Orleans in a part of the city where not many people have a lot of money. The Reillys are poor, just like the rest of their community. Mrs. Reilly is not very educated, but she saved up all of her money to put Ignatius in college. He is one of the most educated people in his city. Due to the fact that not many of the citizens have gone to school much, there are not very good jobs around. Ignatius cannot find a high paying job, so he has to work with people who do not really know what they are doing.
This book is set in the early sixties time period, so there is a lot of racism going on. One of the characters, named Jones, is a victim of this prejudice. He is a black man who keeps getting wrongly accused of crimes by the police. He has a job at a bar, where his pay is below minimum wage. He only keeps the job because his boss threatens to get the police to arrest him. His character represents the black population of New Orleans and shows how badly they were treated.
There ain't a real sequel to this here book, since that poor author commited suicide, but I'll read you what I think them liner notes would look like if there was one.
This novel, a continuation of A Confederacy of Dunces, is a must read for fans of the huge Ignatius J. Reilly. Ignatius and his girlfriend Myrna Minkoff are on the run from the Charity Hospital officials and trying to make some money. They meet some extremely strange characters throughout their travels and get quite a few people wanting them in jail. Mrs. Reilly is worried sick about Ignatius and busy is making preparations for her wedding. All she wants is to have her boy back for her special day. Her fiancé, Claude, is being very nice, but she can't help but notice how reluctant he now seems about getting married. This book is just as hilarious as it's prequel. You will be astounded by the wild imagination of the brilliant John Kennedy Toole, and the uproarious antics of Ignatius and Myrna. This book is too to ingeniously funny to pass up.
Source Citation:
Toole, John Kennedy. A Confederacy of Dunces. New York: Grove Press, 1980.
Book Review: If Ye Have Not Wit, Ye Won't Get ..."It"
Summary: 5 Stars
The power of this unquestionably brilliant literary work is the fusion of highbrow intellect with strategically incisive lowbrow absurdity. For that alone, the author has not only climbed Everest but staked his flag firmly at the peak. This flawless interweaving of the two "forces" (intellect and absurdity) forms one seamless garment of devastating comedy--with wit, in its truest and noblest sense, being the operative mechanism.
The book's protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly, is simultaneously repulsive and yet utterly beloved, for those who possess the means to perceive the undertones and deft brushstrokes of tragicomedy in which Toole cloaked his hero. He is astute and yet inane. He is virtuous and yet insane. And that's just the beginning. All that is required to truly revel in this gem-of-a-book is a genuine possession and/or grasp of...wit! It thrills me that this offering continues, by its very nature and existence, to actively separate the geniuses from the "dunces" of the titular "confederacy."
Ignatius J. Reilly is a slob to end all slobs. An overeducated sociopath living in near-squalor in early 1960s New Orleans, he observes the world through a dual lens of disdain and absolute fascination. This causes his "worldview" to be both spot-on and irrevocably skewed. There are key passages in this novel that point (with subtle but bracing measures of sadness and poignance) to certain traumatic events in Ignatius's formative years that have set him upon his current course of bluster and bilious obsession. Again, herein lies part of the glory of this work--an effortless fusion of truth and psychosis, via comedy. You despise Ignatius, yet you feel a curious sympathy for his plight...and the palpable melancholy that underlies his grandiosity.
Ignatius's mother, Irene, is a confused, erratic, down-at-heel woman just past middle-age, torn between love for her behemoth son and her own sense that true contentment (which she's never had or perhaps deserved) is slipping away from her. She lives with her son as if not quite aware that she's housing a radioactive alien from another planet. The jaw-dropping rapport between the two is now the stuff of literary legend. When Fate (or "Fortuna") leads them from a drunken automobile mishap into a whirling cyclone of constant misadventure, the stage is set for an indictment of modernity the likes of which no other author of the past 100 years could possibly have crafted.
The characters and denizens in this tour-de-farce are spun-out for the reader like Cleopatra being rolled from the interior of a carpet at the feet of Caesar. The reader is indeed "king" here, for the reader is instantly made sovereign "viewer" of a world that includes everything ~and~ the kitchen sink. We have Burma Jones, a jaded, near-vagrant, but visionary black janitor forced to work under the tyrannical rule of one Lana Lee: cold-hearted, scheming proprietress of a seedy Bourbon Street strip-club called "The Night of Joy." There's Darlene, the good-hearted B-girl whose idea of stardom and self-improvement is moving from the stool to the stripping-pole (with pet in tow). There's Gus Levy, reasonable, rational playboy and put-upon owner of a dilapidated pants-factory and his wife, a terminally bored harridan whose questionable "interests" sow hilarious chaos and oppression upon everyone remotely connected with her life (except for her "true love"--her sexually stimulating exercise "board").
There's Patrolman Mancuso, a dimwitted member of the police force who must prove his mettle or suffer humiliating consequences at every turn. There's Mancuso's aunt, Santa Battaglia, a froggy-voiced old bawd who appoints herself matchmaker, bowling coach, and all-around Svengali to the dizzy Irene Reilly and her sinking fortunes. There's the inimitable Miss Trixie, an octogenarian accountant at Levy Pants who is too senile and exhausted to do anything except wander aimlessly ("as if tacking into a gale") toward interference and the vague hope for Easter hams and the paradise of "retirement." Of course, there is Myrna Minkoff, the "minx," the nymphomaniac beatnik who is both Ignatius' nemesis and, ostensibly, his secret love.
The manner in which all of these characters somehow manage to collide or affect each other toward eventual ruin and/or redemption is delineated in a mastercraft of plot, sub-plots, and brilliant "asides" approaching pure sorcery. Toole's work is never anything less than rib-crunching, knee-slapping, brain-freakingly hilarious on a multitude of levels. Every line of madcap dialogue, every gesture, every plot device, every motif, every "prop" is flawless. To reiterate, the comedy comes at you from the stratosphere, from the gutter, from the mundane, and everything in-between. The sheer cohesion of all these levels is the key that makes it not only a superior work in a lofty sense, but eminently readable in an almost base, common way. Pure magic. The coup de grace is that the "dunces" of Reilly's (and Toole's) world don't "get it," and they're (still) apparently not meant to. Not allowed to. Oh, the irony!
'A Confederacy of Dunces' is a must-have for any intelligent, genuinely witty reader, and that kind of reader always and obviously has room for the savoring of comedy. The book is as magnificent (if not quite as classic) in its own way as Cervantes' 'Don Quixote.' If you're one of The Chosen, don't read it in public. You'll be mistaken for a hysterical menace (as you're rolling on the floor, on the subway, perhaps) and they'll cart you off to Charity Hospital.
Book Review: A sweeping magnum opus of jocularity, originality, creativeness and even hurt.
Summary: 5 Stars
Set against the tumultuous backdrop of the 1960s, A Confederacy of Dunces is a book unlike any other that I have previously read. I have often heard it referred to as THAT book, a kind of complement coming from those in the know. Having read it, all I can say about it is that THAT book is stupendous on many different levels, from its forceful yet literary bluntness to its all-around observational astuteness, from character development all the way down to the colorful scenes in which New Orleans is "lovingly" depicted. And above all else, the rude, ribaldry and stand-offish humor is just too good of a reading pleasure to pass up, a book that's all laced together into episodic lunacy and idiocy. A Confederacy of Dunces will make you want to read it and read it and read it all over again till it's just torn and tattered. No hyperbole here. Just honesty.
With impeccable writing prowess that is evocative of modern Southern writing, A Confederacy of Dunces just crackles with societal acumen, raunchiness and absurdity.
At the beginning, the main character-Ignatius J. Reilly-a thirtieth, idiosyncratic intellectual lay-about who's better at preaching his doctrine of the end of the world through its vices then he is about truly combatting the influences they hold over him, is in search of a job. It is a deplorable task set by his beleaguered mother, Irene, a not full-blown lush with a penchant for muscatel, whose frayed nerves cause her to crash slightly into a building, whereby she needs to make financial amends. Hence, he is cast out into the wide world, using his own warped ideological thinking and the philosophical beliefs-as espoused by Boethius-as one would clutch onto the Bible and Jesus Christ in order to combat the known modernism of a sometimes off-kilter pop culture. And never mind the Blessed Virgin Mary, whom many people seek in times of woe and confusion (for he and his mom are both semi practicing Catholics), Ignatius has his own female goddess, Fortuna, a kind of feminine Holy Spirit, if you will, who he constantly accuses, till the end, at least, of his misfortune and mea culpa misery.
But once out in the open, to his mother's joy, he becomes a job seeker, and the jobs he falls into, well, it's quite something. He partly wants to pursue this endeavor in order to put Myrna Minkoff, an on and off again friend/girlfriend in her her place; she is a bleeding heart bohemian with a guitar who is always involved in one social cause or another. She cares about Ignatius, even sees brilliance in him. Yet, she sees that he is stunted and repressed, and she wants to unlock that. For her, it is all a matter of sex. Once he lets loose, he will be free, for that normal human inclination cannot simply be locked away and forgotten. And Ignatius, much to his credit, certainly does try. She exists in the novel through flashbacks, a series of correspondence and then, in the very end the two teammates are finally reunited.
While the correspondences between Ignatius and Myrna are entertaining, it's not until Ignatius lands a job with Levy Pants and then Paradise Vendors, a hot dog company, that things just start to blow up. And somehow, it all goes back to the Night of Joy, a dive of a strip bar whose proprietress, Lana Lee, is a money hungary, hard-bitten, cut-throat businesswoman. She's involved in a side pornography photo ring and hates Ignatius with every fiber of her being, for he and his mother entered her "establishment" in the early part of the novel, and she had him pegged as a bizarre freak who was not good for her business. Also in Lee's employ is Darlene and Burman Jones; the former is a ditzy but good-hearted dancer who wants to better herself by doing a classier strip tease involving her pet cockatoo: Harlot O'Hara, the virginal Southern beauty. Quite a show! The latter is the bar's janitor who gets paid below the minimum wage, a sum that he resentfully agrees to, for if he does not, he will get arrested for being a vagrant. Lana Lee surely does take advantage of the Jim Crow attitude, but Jones is ever mindful and ever patient. But his actions are seen throughout the novel and culminate with Lana Lee's eventual morals charge arrest alongside those of a couple of mannish and violent lesbians. And Angelo Mancuso's rise, from incompetent police officer who initially tried to arrest Ignatius at the beginning of the novel, to top-notch cop. There are so many interlocking stories that offer equal hilarity, for these are just snippets.
A Confederacy of Dunces is truly a cyclone of inventiveness, word play, colorfulness and sheer storytelling. All the characters who encounter Ignatius either get their just deserts or reap positive benefits from their meeting. The characters Gus Levy, Burma Jones, Angelo Mancuso and Miss Trixie are cases in point who benefit from their encounter with Ignatius. The story first and foremost is about the man Ignatius, a true brother to Don Quixote, a bloated, long-winded fat slob who thinks that the world is screwed up and he's the only normal one in it. It's actually a relatable kind of thinking. Stop the world. I want to get off. I know I've said that more often than not. It is about the interlocking idiots who make up our lives, the confederacy of individuals either for us or against us. But at heart, there is goodness. There is just a short supply of tolerance in dealing with them. And Ignatius is the exemplar in the testing of that tolerance. A great book.
Book Review: A Confederacy of Dunces as a Moral Compass
Summary: 5 Stars
Reviews of A Confederacy of Dunces almost always fall into one of two polarly opposite categories. We either love Toole's humor or we are repulsed by Ignatius and are entirely immune to the comic aspects of the book. Sure, we can attribute the lack of variety in the reviews as typical of any self-selecting poll. In other words, only people who feel strongly about the book will respond, so all reviewers will have either fanatically positive or negative feelings. But, logical as this sounds, if we look at other reviews we find a much higher rate of reviews of mediocrity, three stars, "it was OK", and the like, that seems to disprove this idea of apathy among the undecided readers. Why, then, do reviewers feel so passionate about a comedy that promotes nothing?
The root of both the comedy of the book and many reviewers' hatred is Ignatius P. Reilly, the corpulent, egotistical anti-hero of the novel. Whether we love or hate Ignatius ultimately determines whether or not we enjoy the novel. This is not to say that there is no comedy outside of Ignatius' actions. On the contrary much of the comedy comes from clever allusions to previous scenes, comic bits that we have to pay close attention to in order to laugh. Take for example nearly any scene involving Patrolman Manusco in costume. In one of his first costumes, Manusco wears a pair of Bermuda shorts and a red beard that he stole to complete his outfit. After we hear of his ridiculous outfit, several unrelated scenes go by until a few pages later when Jones is riding the bus and sees a man in a red beard and Bermuda shorts being beaten by a man with a rolled-up newspaper. This style allows us to remember and laugh at the setup for the joke, enjoy the scene itself, and also to anticipate some comic tie-in with nearly all of the absurd situations that Toole introduces. When Ignatius writes that letter to Abelman's, we know that eventually a response will arrive and so we not only laugh at the letter but also in anticipation of what could happen.
Unfortunately, all of this comedy can be easily overlooked by either a reader who is either too hurried or insulted by the conduct of Ignatius. If we hate Ignatius, we will be blind to all of the subtle humor that occurs around him. All of Ignatius' comic power is derived from his utter disregard for everyone around him and his ridiculous ideas that he believes will improve everything. To many people, this egotism makes Ignatius unlikeable past the point of being funny. Or, maybe people don't like him because he is so cruel to his mother, because he is an absolute failure with eight years of college education leaching off his widowed mother and insulting her at every opportunity. Whatever the reason, many readers are so repulsed by Ignatius' character that they hate the entire novel. These people fail to realize one of the inherent truths of comedy, that all or at least almost all comedy is by nature cruel.
We can only find Ignatius funny if we can suspend rational judgement of the characters and realize that this is entirely a comedy, with every element present only to maximize the humor of the piece. Sure, none of us would ever like to meet Ignatius in real life and would almost certainly detest him if we did. But, taken out of the context of reality, Ignatius' ideas are utterly ridiculous and hilarious, and perhaps everyone too indignant to enjoy them should stick to the non-offensive comedy of network sitcoms or avoid comedy altogether because they just don't get it. By no means does this mean that only the morally deficient can enjoy the book. I consider myself to have firm morals and strong convictions, but I can put them aside in the spirit of imagination and laugh at Ignatius without being turned off by his faults. Personal values don't preclude admiration of Toole's genius comedy, self-righteousness does. Readers who did not laugh at this novel should first reread the book with a more open mind, and if they still cannot find any humor in the novel must face up to the sad truth that they lack a truly refined sense of humor. We hate to acknowledge our faults, especially something as serious as a admitting that we don't understand what's funny, but by any definition of comedy, A Confederacy of Dunces is a masterpiece packed full of laughs. Even if you're one of these unfortunates without a sense of humor, don't despair. I bet you'll find this week's Marmaduke to be a gut-buster.