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A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Plot synopsis:

In John Kennedy Tooles A Confederacy of Dunces, Ignatius J. Rielly is standing in front

of the D.H. Holmes waiting for his mother when Officer Mancuso questions him as a suspicious
character. Eventually, his mother Irene exists the store, and she and Ignatius are able to escape
after inciting an older man to call the officer a communiss. Escaping to a bar, Ignatius meets
stripper Darlene and proprietor Lana Lee while his mother drinks. As a result of her drinking,
Irene crashes the car and is told that she must pay for the damages. The aunt of Officer Mancuso
befriends Irene and convinces her that Ignatius should pick up a job to help pay off the damages.
Ignatius is outraged at the proposal, but forced to take a job filing for Levy Pants. The novel
follows Ignatius as he attempts to work and the other characters whom he directly and indirectly
affects.

Major Themes:

Education: the author appears to criticize education throughout the novel. Ignatius is
educated, having earned a masters degree and graduated smart according to his
mother, but his jobs do not show this. He keeps low level jobs, and fails to succeed in
them. Ignatius flaunts his knowledge to insult people, and the novel itself is full of
allusions and references especially to the Middle Ages, which Ignatius considers
himself expert in.
Race: the novel depicts the struggles that black people faced in the South with Burma
Jones. Jones is working for little pay in modern slavery but is desperate for a job to
not be arrested. The novel simultaneously satirizes the Civil Rights with Ignatiuss
failed attempt at causing a riot with the black workers of Levy Pant. Ignatius also
suggests that he should have been a Negro. He feels a connection with the black
community that he thought would carry him through the black workers, but they only
find him as a source of entertainment,
Wealth: the novel is has a range of characters in different economic statuses who all
suffer in different ways. Mr. Levy, a high earning executive, has problems very
different from Jones, a poor black man. This helps illustrate throughout the novel that
even the characters with money have problems so money should not be an end goal.
Characterizations:

Ignatius J. Reilly is a 30-year-old man who lives with his mother and the main
protagonist of A Confederacy of Dunces. Iganatiuss problems begin after his mother
Irene crashes her car into a building forcing Ignatius to get a job. His various jobs
result in mayhem for the other characters of the novel. As a character, he is well
educated, particularly in Medieval knowledge, but uses this to insult others rather
than improve his life. He also finds difficulty in connecting with the modern world,
since he is more partial to the Middle Ages.
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Burma Jones is a black man who is being to work for very little money because of
police prejudice. It is better for him to have a terrible job, than no job because cops
are eager to arrest unemployed black men. Since he is treated so terribly at his job, he
is motivated to reveal the illegal dealings of Lana.
Myrna Minkoff was Ignatiuss girlfriend at one point with whom he exchanges
letters. These letters reveal her obsession with activism, sex, and saving Ignatius. She
is Ignatiuss inspiration for starting a revolution in Levy Pants factory.

Connections to major works studied

A Confederacy of Dunces resembles Faulkners As I Lay Dying with a similar family dynamic.
Both novels depict families who are willing to send a relative away for the betterment of the
family. In Faulkners novel, the Bundrens will have no way to pay the debt that Darl
accumulated with his burning of the barn, so they send him to an insane asylum. In A
Confederacy of Dunces, Irene is convinced by her friend that is better for her to send Ignatius
to an insane asylum. Both families dont necessarily believe that the member they are sending
is mentally unstable, but see the benefits of their hospitalization nevertheless.

Additionally, A Confederacy of Dunces is similar to The Storm because both are examples
regionalism. The novels both take place in New Orleans, so the authors used local diction to
portray the characters more accurately. Toole used spelling to portray how a word would be
pronounced by a character. For example, Claude in A Confederacy of Dunces only ever uses
the word communiss rather than communist and characters say chirren rather than
children. In The Storm, Kate Chopin used a mix of English and French to get this effect.