Meet Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole's tragicomic tale,
A Confederacy of Dunces. This 30-year-old medievalist lives at home with
his mother in New Orleans, pens his magnum opus on Big Chief writing pads
he keeps hidden under his bed, and relays to anyone who will listen the
traumatic experience he once had on a Greyhound Scenicruiser bound for
Baton Rouge. ("Speeding along in that bus was like hurtling into the abyss.")
But Ignatius's quiet life of tyrannizing his mother and writing his endless
comparative history screeches to a halt when he is almost arrested by the
overeager Patrolman Mancuso--who mistakes him for a vagrant--and then
involved in a car accident with his tipsy mother behind the wheel.
One thing leads to another, and before he knows it, Ignatius is out pounding
the pavement in search of a job.
Over the next several hundred pages, our hero stumbles from one adventure
to the next. His stint as a hotdog vendor is less than successful, and he
soon turns his employers at the Levy Pants Company on their heads.
Ignatius's path through the working world is populated by marvelous
secondary characters: the stripper Darlene and her talented cockatoo;
the septuagenarian secretary Miss Trixie, whose desperate attempts to
retire are constantly, comically thwarted; gay blade Dorian Greene;
sinister Miss Lee, proprietor of the Night of Joy nightclub; and Myrna
Minkoff, the girl Ignatius loves to hate. The many subplots that weave
through A Confederacy of Dunces are as complicated as anything you'll find
in a Dickens novel, and just as beautifully tied together in the end. But
it is Ignatius--selfish, domineering, and deluded, tragic and comic and
larger than life--who carries the story. He is a modern-day Quixote beset
by giants of the modern age. His fragility cracks the shell of comic
bluster, revealing a deep streak of melancholy beneath the antic humor.
John Kennedy Toole committed suicide in 1969 and never saw the publication
of his novel. Ignatius Reilly is what he left behind, a fitting memorial
to a talented and tormented life. --Alix Wilber
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