I’m a new resident of the Crescent City, and coronavirus concerns have irritatingly kept me from being able to explore the city as much as I’d like to. The fact that there is a life-size statue of Reilly slouching today in that exact spot, glaring in perpetual suspicion at the bad taste of all the tourists and Quarter characters who are always milling around Canal Street, tells us how well author John Kennedy Toole knew his turf. The first page is one of the great opening paragraphs because it quickly and subtly establishes so much about the story to follow: we see the oddly named Ignatius J Reilly, our antihero protagonist’s massive and disheveled physicality, his pride, his snobbery, and the knowing detail of the only place he could ever possibly stand to live in, which is The City that Care Forgot. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress.” In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J Reilly’s supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D.H. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once…. Right at the beginning of A Confederacy of Dunces we immediately know what’s up: “A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head.

Imagine Felix Ungar caught in Oscar Madison's body and you'll get the picture.A reassessment on the 40th anniversary of A Confederacy of Dunces, a novel that many consider one of the funniest ever written by an American.Ī Confederacy of Duncesby John Kennedy Toole. An odd mix of snob and slob, Ignatius mourns the loss of civility, yet sports a green hunting cap, plaid flannel shirt and 'voluminous tweed trousers.' His hobbies include hating contemporary cinema, writing screeds against The Enlightenment and belching. Ignatius, a medieval scholar with a master's degree, missed a chance at a university job because he arrived for the interview without a necktie, opting for a lumber jacket instead.

Written in the 1960s, but not published until 1980, 'Confederacy' serves up an unlikely antihero in Ignatius Reilly, a 30-year-old living with his mother in blue-collar New Orleans. As another commencement season arrives this month, spilling hundreds of thousands of new graduates into the employment market, perhaps we should give each of them a copy of John Kennedy Toole's 'A Confederacy of Dunces,' a comic and cautionary lesson in how not to get a job.

A confederacy of dunces book review