Counter-Currents
3,543 words 
John Kennedy Toole
A Confederacy of Dunces
Foreword by Walker Percy
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980
A Confederacy of Dunces is one of the greatest comic novels ever written. It takes its name from a line of Swift’s which serves as its epigraph: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.”
This has a double meaning. First, it is a reference to the book’s main character (he cannot be called a hero) Ignatius J. Riley, who thinks he’s a genius oppressed by dunces, but isn’t. Second, there is something prophetic about this epigraph, for when John Kennedy Toole put these words to paper, he was a genuine genius leading an apparently charmed life. But great hardships awaited him, delivered by dunces both real and imaginary.
Toole submitted Confederacy to Roger Gottlieb at Simon and Schuster. Gottlieb praised the book but urged Toole to revise it, and then revise it again and again. After two years of revisions and correspondence, Toole gave up in frustration and disgust, put the manuscript in a box, and focused on other things. He was a brilliant scholar and teacher and had great prospects as a university professor of English literature.
When Toole was 30, his friends and family started noticing classic symptoms of paranoia. He actually believed that the dunces around him were conspiring against him. Eventually, he emptied his bank account and drove off, abandoning his home, job, and Ph.D. program in New Orleans. After crisscrossing America for more than two months, Toole committed suicide by gassing himself in his car with exhaust. It was 1969. John Kennedy Toole was 31 years old.
Confederacy was published due to the tireless efforts of Toole’s mother Thelma. After the book was passed over by a long list of mainstream publishing dunces, Thelma enlisted novelist Walker Percy, who helped place it at Louisiana State University Press, where it was published in 1980 to enormous critical and commercial acclaim.
Confederacy won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and has sold more than two million copies in 23 languages. Even the titles of the translations will make you laugh: Die Verschwörung der Idioten, Una confabulació d’imbècils, Uma Conspiração de Estúpidos, Dumskallarnas sammansvärjning, Fjolsernes forbund, etc.
Toole was an extraordinary talent, and Confederacy is a masterpiece. So why did it take so long to get into print? I think the main reason is that the book is quite politically incorrect. Blacks are depicted as shiftless buffoons. Gay men are depicted as campy, superficial, sex-obsessed pinheads. Lesbians are depicted as boorish brutes. Jews are depicted as rich, neurotic, and obsessed with sex and psychotherapy. Toole’s Jewish characters also have strong penchants to meddle—sometimes disastrously—in the lives, culture, and politics of the goyim.
In truth, every character in Confederacy is some sort of idiot or buffoon, including all the whites, whether they be Irish, Italian, French Creole, or Anglo. But it is okay to mock poor white people, especially in the South. (Confederacy is set in New Orleans.) Yet it is not okay to mock blacks, homosexuals, and Jews.
Indeed, according to Toole’s biographer Cory MacLaughlin, the Jewish characters were a particular sticking point for Roger Gottlieb at Simon and Schuster.[1] Given Jewish sensitivities about anti-Semitism, which are also mocked in Confederacy, it certainly seems plausible that Jews and non-Jews alike throughout the publishing industry shared the same reservations. Moreover, after Confederacy became a best-seller, Thelma Toole explicitly claimed that Jewish ethnic animus played a role in Gottlieb’s decision not to publish the book.[2]
A Confederacy of Dunces is the story of Ignatius P. Reilly, the only child of a working class Irish Catholic family in New Orleans. It is set in the early 1960s, when the book was written. The civil rights movement, including Jewish outside agitators, is in the background.
Ignatius is 30, his father is dead, and he lives at home with his mother Irene. Ignatius is the precocious child of ordinary people, which means he was not particularly well-understood by his family and neighbors. He was probably the first generation of his family to go to college. Then he earned a master’s degree. Something medieval. He’s always bloviating about Boethius and Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim.
But after that something snapped. He couldn’t launch. He keeps recounting a traumatic visit to a university in Baton Rouge (perhaps Louisiana State, which eventually published the book). Was he there to interview for a teaching job? Or was he hoping to continue his graduate studies? The answer is not clear. What is clear is that the trip ended in disaster.
Ignatius retreated to his bedroom in New Orleans, where he has stagnated ever since. When we meet him, he is fat, slovenly, and self-indulgent. He spends his time hate-watching movies and television and listening to pop songs. He condemns pop culture as vulgar and decadent but continues to consume it. He scribbles pompous diatribes on children’s drawing tablets but never attempts to publish them. He farts around with musical instruments, the more archaic the better (the lute, the recorder). He consumes vast amounts of sweets, soft-drinks, and hot dogs, growing ever fatter.
Ignatius has never had a real girlfriend. He had a pretend girlfriend in Myrna Minkoff, a Jewish Leftist agitator whom he knew in college. But when she tried to consummate things, the neighbor next door could hear Ignatius screaming “Put down that skirt . . . Get off my bed. . . . How dare you? I’m a virgin” (p. 319). Ignatius is, however, a compulsive masturbator, which he turned into something of an art form, even a ritual, involving such accoutrements as a rubber glove, a strip of silk from an old umbrella, and a jar of Noxema (p. 26).
Yet despite his degraded existence, Ignatius speaks pompously and carries himself with great dignity. He is actually an extreme narcissist. Not all narcissists are beautiful people. Ugly and obnoxious people can be narcissists too, but they gain their sense of superiority not by being admired by others, but by holding others in contempt. Ignatius hoists himself up by putting others down. He’s rude, obnoxious, and condescending.
Ignatius reconciles his inflated self-image with his squalid existence through an array of postures, excuses, and delusions. Basically, Ignatius tells himself that he fails at life because he’s too good for this world.
Ignatius broke with the Catholic church as a teen when a priest refused to officiate at the burial of his dog. But sometimes he finds it convenient to embrace Catholicism in its high medieval form as a perspective from which he can condemn the whole modern world for its “lack of theology and geometry” (p. 1). But of all the things the medievals looked down upon, the only one Ignatius abstains from is work.
Ignatius also embraces a diametrically opposed worldview, modern psychology, for it too provides him with copious excuses for failure. Thus he speaks endlessly of his traumas, which oddly do not motivate him to do something. They function only as excuses for more idleness.
Finally, Ignatius is a hypochondriac, always going on about how emotional upset causes his “valve” to constrict, preventing food from passing from his stomach to his intestine. This must be of special concern to someone who never stops eating.
Ignatius, in short, is one of the first literary appearances of what people on the Alt Right spoke of as the “NEET,” a British acronym for “Not in Education, Employment, or Training.” If Ignatius were born in the 1990s, he would today be an “extremely online” gamer and “shitposter.” He’d still be fat. He’d still be living at home, sponging off his parents. He’d still be a virgin. He’d still be masturbating, but now with a whole world of online porn to consume. He’d still be rude and condescending. And he’d still be pouring scorn down on modernity from on high, although he’d probably be citing Evola alongside Boethius and Hrotsvitha.
Ignatius also appears to be what James O’Meara calls a “Trad Queen”: a homosexual who embraces an ultra-traditionalist form of Catholicism as a cover for never having sex with women.[3] But of course Ignatius is too self-indulgent to actually enter the priesthood. Toole doesn’t explicitly say that Ignatius is homosexual. In fact, the one sexual fantasy he relates involves a dog (p. 27). But there’s definitely something flamboyant about him. Even though he is a disgusting slob, he carries himself grandly and with his own sort of style. What, for instance, are we to make of Ignatius going on about his muffler to an old man who was considering hiring him as a hotdog vendor?
“. . . It can also be worn as a shawl. Look.”
“Well,” the old man said finally, after watching Ignatius employ the muffler as a cummerbund, a sash, and a pair of kilts, a sling for a broken arm, and a kerchief, “you ain’t gonna do too much damage to Paradise Vendors in one hour.” (p. 139)
Homosexuals also initially take him for one of their own, although he quickly wears out his welcome because he’s too self-absorbed and rude to be any fun.
As the novel progresses, Ignatius’ bloated self-image is increasingly punctured and deflated as his deeds come back to haunt him. But as a narcissist, Ignatius is incapable of reflecting on and revising his self-image, thus he reacts with rage and increasing paranoia.
An inflated self-image logically leads to paranoia, for if one thinks too highly of oneself and refuses to revise such views in light of failures and negative feedback, how do you explain why others don’t love you as much as you think they should? Malice or stupidity is the most likely explanation. And when many people share the same negative judgments of you, that can’t be because they are all based on the same facts, namely your actual negative traits. No, the only possible explanation is that malice and stupidity are passing from person to person like a contagion, i.e., the dunces—evil dunces—are in a confederacy against you.
The basic story of Confederacy is that Irene Reilly can no longer afford to keep Ignatius in leisure, so she forces him to get a job.
The first job he takes is at the Levy Pants factory, which is run by Gus Levy, a nice guy with a hands-off management style, unlike his shrewish wife, who fancies herself educated because she signed up for a correspondence course in psychology. She has made a hobby of tikkun olaming Miss Trixie, their superannuated accountant who is a hoarder and slipping into dementia.
As soon as Ignatius is hired, he begins decorating the office like a kindergarten classroom (anything to avoid work) and plotting against his colleagues. Eventually, he organizes the black laborers into a Crusade for Moorish Dignity and tries to incite a riot. The riot fizzles, and Ignatius is fired.
Ignatius is completely uninterested in progressive political causes. He thinks blacks are childish and primitive but envies what he imagines to be their innocence. He also wishes to weaponize them against the bourgeois society that would force him to work. But his primary motive for organizing the Crusade for Moorish Dignity is merely to impress/show up Myrna Minkoff.
Myrna is modeled after some of Toole’s students at Hunter College in the early 1960s, whom he characterized as “aggressive, pseudo-intellectual ‘liberal’ girls”[4] who, according to his friend Clayelle Dalferes, were “only interested in anti-Semitism.”[5] Ever vigilant against antisemitism, Myrna is the epitome of Jewish radicalism. The daughter of a wealthy businessman, she incites blacks against whites and Catholics against WASPs. She is a fervent believer in psychoanalysis as well, preaching personal and political redemption through orgasms. Naturally, she also promotes miscegenation between whites and blacks. Just as Mrs. Levy has adopted Miss Trixie, Myrna has made Ignatius her hobby, her project.
Ignatius’ next job is as a hot dog vendor, for which he is ill-suited because he’s lazy, churlish, and eats most of the inventory. Ignatius’ employer sends him to the French Quarter to hawk weenies dressed as a pirate. This catches the attention of Dorian Greene, a flamboyant homosexual who invites Ignatius to one of his fabulous parties.
Ignatius plans to use the party to launch a new political movement to Save the World Through Degeneracy. Ignatius wants gay men to infiltrate the highest levels of politics and the military around the world. Once we are ruled by homosexuals, he avers,
. . . the world will enjoy not war but global orgies conducted with the utmost protocol and the most truly international spirit, for these people do transcend simple national differences. Their minds are on one goal; they are truly united; they think as one. . . . From time to time the Chief of Staff, the President, and so on, dressed in sequins and feathers, will entertain the leaders, i.e., the perverts, of all the other countries at balls and parties. Quarrels of any sort could easily be straightened out in the men’s room of the redecorated United Nations. (pp. 238–39)
Again, Ignatius is not really interested in world peace or gay rights. He’s just trying to get a rise out of Myrna Minkoff. She acknowledges that the “Sodomite business” has some merit: “I can see that we might use this Sodomite party to drain off the fringe-group fascists. Maybe we could split the right wing in half” (p. 269). But she’s more concerned with Ignatius’ mental health. By this time in the novel, the reader has concluded that Ignatius is not just colorful and eccentric, he’s insane and malevolent. Myrna, however, thinks he can be saved through “therapy” and recommends that he get it immediately, lest he become a “screaming queen” (p. 269).
You can find this essay and many others in Greg Johnson’s book Novel Takes: Essays on Literature, available for order here.
Ignatius’ attempt to launch the Save the World Through Degeneracy movement is a predictable flop. The gays just want to chatter, drink cocktails, and listen to Lena Horne. The lesbians just want to smash beer cans on their faces.
After some more misadventures, including being attacked by a parrot from a burlesque show, Ignatius ends up passed out on the streetcar tracks, laid up in the hospital, plastered on the front page of the newspaper, and fired from his vending job.
Irene is mortified. Apparently, the only thing more disgraceful than being a weenie vendor is being in the newspapers. The last straw, however, is not the public disgrace. When Irene wants to remarry in her 50s, Ignatius tries to prevent it. He doesn’t care about her happiness. He just wants his mother’s undivided attention.
Irene finally realizes she has raised a monster: “You learnt everything, Ignatius, except how to be a human being” (p. 322). She loses all interest in his prattle and decides to have him committed to the psychiatric ward of Charity Hospital, which was a place of horror.
Fortunately for Ignatius, Myrna Minkoff arrives from New York in the nick of time to spirit him away. “This is a very meaningful moment,” she says. “I feel as if I am saving someone” (p. 345). She has found a new project, and Ignatius has found a new mommy. It isn’t long, though, before she has second thoughts: “Ignatius, all at once you’re your old horrible self. All at once I think I’m making a very big mistake” (p. 347). But Ignatius manages to allay her fears. The end of the novel is ambiguous:
He stared gratefully at the back of Myrna’s head, at the pigtail that swung innocently at his knee. Grateful. How ironic, Ignatius thought. Taking the pigtail in one of his paws, he pressed it warmly to his wet moustache. (p. 348)
Genuine gratitude is a new experience for Ignatius. But as soon as he thinks it is ironic, he is already distancing himself from it. His old horrible self will soon be making a comeback.
Nevertheless, if you read this novel, you will be dying to know what happens next. Then you will die a little when you remember that there was no next chapter in Ignatius’ life, or in the life of his creator.
Confederacy has been criticized for being “plotless” and “about nothing.” Of course such trifles never stopped Seinfeld from being hilarious. But these accusations are unjust. Confederacy has a number of concurrent plotlines with overlapping characters that weave in and out of each other in a fugal fashion.
Toole also deploys recurring themes, like Wagnerian Leitmotives, with perfect comic timing. The most hilarious is Ignatius’ valve. Others include Mrs. Levy’s exercise table, Miss Trixie’s dentures, and Burma Jones’ clouds of smoke.
Confederacy is less like a movie with a unified plot than a situation comedy series. In fact, although all attempts to adapt it to the screen have failed, Confederacy would make a great miniseries of about six to eight episodes. Larry David would be the perfect director.
Critics also condemn Confederacy because the characters don’t change. This is unjust too. First, some of the characters do change. Chief among them is Ignatius’ mother, Irene, who finally decides to stop indulging her son and start enjoying what’s left of her own life. Mr. Levy changes by deciding finally to make his father’s business his own and to cast off his nagging, malevolent wife. Even Ignatius seems to change a little bit at the very end. But his chances remain quite slim. Second, Toole believed that people don’t really change. They just become more themselves.
Although Toole was an admirer of Flannery O’Connor and was himself brought up Catholic, Confederacy does not have an O’Connoresque “moment of grace,” where God intervenes in human life. This is also true of Toole’s other novel, The Neon Bible, an astonishingly mature work that Toole wrote at the age of 16, very much under O’Connor’s influence.
Inevitably, people wonder if Ignatius is based on a real person. One source was Bobby Byrne, an English professor at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, where Toole taught for a year. Byrne inspired Ignatius’ general build, voice, and manner, as well as his absurd style of dress, his musical hobbies, and his interest in the Middle Ages.
But the deeper inspiration came from Toole himself. Like Ignatius, Toole was an Irish Catholic from New Orleans, an only child, and an intellectual with a Masters’ Degree. Toole had a tendency toward fatness, but he kept the weight off until he began descending into madness. He wasn’t homosexual, but he was sometimes thought to be. Ignatius is insane, with a strong paranoid streak. There was insanity on both sides of Toole’s family, and it claimed him in the end.
But Ignatius is not Toole’s self-portrait. (Nor is Irene a portrait of Toole’s mother, Thelma. There is almost no resemblance.) Ignatius Reilly is a portrait of a vice-ridden and ultimately insane pseudo-intellectual crank. The portrait has a “There but for the grace of God go I” quality, because Toole constructed Ignatius by first imagining himself and then subtracting all his virtues. (Flannery O’Connor’s scathing portraits of intellectuals were constructed in the exact same way.)
Toole was a serious intellectual. A child prodigy, he skipped two grades in elementary school, entered Tulane at 16, graduated with honors, then completed his master’s degree in literature at Columbia in one year, graduating with high honors. He was a highly talented and popular teacher at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, at Hunter College, in the US Army, and at Dominican College in New Orleans. Ignatius, by contrast, is a dilettante and crank. Toole was enormously industrious and well-organized. Ignatius is lazy and chaotic. Toole was highly sociable, mixed well with all sorts of people, and was a meticulous observer of human nature and behavior, all of which is reflected in his novels. Ignatius, however, is entirely self-absorbed and alien to humanity. Toole was known for his gallant Southern manners. He was a sharp dresser, a good dancer, and the life of any party: charming, witty, and a gifted mimic. Ignatius is a slovenly boor. Toole was heterosexual and popular with women. Ignatius is a virgin and a likely homosexual. Toole actually supported his parents financially when they fell on hard times. Ignatius is a parasite on his mother. By all accounts, Toole was well aware of his gifts, but he was empathetic and ethical in his dealings with others—although people feared becoming the butt of his jokes and mimicry. Ignatius, however, is just a mean and selfish bastard.
This brings us to another sense in which Confederacy is politically incorrect. We are ruled by people who think of themselves as intellectuals. The publishing industry is certainly full of them. Toole created a scathing satire of a pseudointellectual and offered it as a mirror. Many readers winced and quietly marked Toole as a traitor to their class. Radical political movements are also havens for pompous pseudo-intellectuals and cranks. We need to know how to spot them before they become ensconced. Thus I recommend A Confederacy of Dunces highly, not just as a literary masterpiece but as a diagnostic tool. You’ll laugh a whole lot. But sometimes you might be laughing at yourself.
Notes
[1] Cory MacLauchlin, Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces (New York: Da Capo Press, 2012), pp. 174, 241–42.
[2] MacLauchlin, Butterfly in the Typewriter, pp. 241–42.
[3] James J. O’Meara, “Trad Queen Story Hour,” parts 1–3, Counter-Currents, June 12, 15, and 16, 2020.
[4] MacLauchlin, Butterfly in the Typewriter, p. 112.
[5] MacLauchlin, Butterfly in the Typewriter, p. 112.
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20 comments
Do you have any insight into how the manuscript changed in response to Gottlieb’s requested revisions, or what those requests may have been? I wonder if there was an attempt to bowdlerize the work and if so whether it succeeded to any degree…
When Thelma Toole submitted it to publishers, she used the original manuscript and refused to hear of any edits. Thus the book was published without revision.
A good woman! I’m relieved to hear it.
Not one of the funniest novels ever but the funniest novel ever! I stood up and applauded when I finished.
Great review Greg. I plan on rereading it soon.
Thanks. It really is a work of genius.
I read it at least twenty years ago on the recommendation of an older female marketing executive I was dating. I guess it was making the rounds in her circles. Although I was certainly race conscious at the time, it was well before I was completely red pilled. I thoroughly enjoyed the novel, especially its humor. And I noted with approval that there was no negro worship in its pages, quite the opposite. Any commentary on Jewishness went over my head, though. I may have to reread it looking for Toole’s insights on the JQ. Thanks for the great review, Greg, and the trip down memory lane.
Thanks. I really enjoyed writing this review. I have read Confederacy three times now, and I know I will dip into it again and again.
Thank you for bringing back a flood of pleasant memories! A Confederacy of Dunces is one of my perennial favorites. Nothing like reading from one of Ignatius’ Big Chief tablets…
I read the book many years ago and didn’t like it. I think Ignatius is rude, obnoxious, disgusting, and has no redeeming qualities except he uses big educated words to show how freaking wise he is compared to us ordinary slobs. I was reminded by something Jim Kunstler said in writing: don’t trash your hero. Make us like him, or at least sympathize in some way. I had no interest in Ignatius and thought him being so scholarly and his mother being a dimwit was also a bit incongruous. I’ll grant the setting is good and language has points, but Riley leaves me cold, and I wonder about all of you who get into this story. I do think the novel was typical of the 60’s, and I was surprised it didn’t get published, since there were a lot of books around like this. It was obvious when Ignatius’s jewish girl friend showed up there was going to be a part two.
Interestingly enough, my novel Guards was liked by my writing group, one man said it reminded him a lot of A Confederacy of Dunces.
Also, on Miles Mathis’s site, he claims the novel is written by a committee at Langley (CIA), as is a lot of fiction, and that Toole was an invented person.
It does sound odd that he wrote this book, then killed himself because it got rejected, and nothing is really known about him. Sort of like one book wonders like Grace Metallicus (Peyton Place) or Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird).
The book just leaves me cold. It seems I’ll never really be a true CC type. Poor me.
There’s a mountain of biographical data on Toole, including two biographies, memoirs by friends, students, and teachers, correspondence and other papers, another novel.
What kind of idiot is Miles Mathis? What’s more likely? All those people are lying? Or Miles Mathis is a paranoid fantasist?
I don’t believe all that, but I do sort of agree with gotlieb’s comments on the book. The antisemitism is obviously imitation of Philip Roth, very imitative. The smut, the master-debation. The Roth story Defender of the Faith is a stab at Jewish nepotism, much like the passage I describe in CofD. To me that was the salient feature of the book, but all that seems to be lost on its myriad admirers. A Jew can say such things, but a non Jew? Maybe that’s why it didn’t get published. But the book does capture New Orleans really well, and, well, the people appear to like it!
ps. If you went up to the average reader of CofD and said,”do you think this book is a satire of Jewish ethnocentrism,” they would look at you stunned, then their mouth would hang open and their hands would start to shake visibly, then they would compose themselves and say something like, “no not at all, you must be a hater.”
“I … thought him being so scholarly and his mother being a dimwit was also a bit incongruous. ”
In the words of Curly Howard, I resemble that remark!
I read this book back in high school and don’t remember all of it. I’m not sure I agree it should have been published, but I did like some of the epistolatory sections, which I think must derive from Saul Bellow. The center piece of the novel is the letter from Minkoff in which she describes the folk singer from Israel that she is in love with who hates WASPs, but then she finds out he is really a baptist from Alabama and compares it to when she was feeding a squirrel in Poe Park and it was really a rat, which meant she decided whether she liked the singer solely based on his ethnic origin. A satire of extreme ethnocentrism. I think Poe Park refers to Pocket Park at Tulane, a student gathering spot, which is next to the student union. There is a heavy yankee/jewish presence at Tulane. In the surrounding environs it is known as “Jewlane,” lol.
I am from New Orleans, btw, but I went to Xavier, a historically black school, because I am able to pass as black, but I used to date a Jewish girl who went to Tulane, so I have a passing familiarity with its environs. The book is more interesting if you are from New Orleans. It captures it pretty well. Also does George Washington Cable, particularly in the story Posson Jones. I had a Cajun uncle, and I swear Jules, a creole, in the story is exactly like him, his speech peppered with “mais.”
So a question that I ponder is whether Toole was one of the “guys” the usual suspects were after? His paranoid behavior might suggest this. He thought he was being followed and supposedly searched his dwelling for listening devices. 30s is late for a psychotic break. His suicide is suggestive and that they were keeping his book out of publication, although im not a thousand percent it should have been. Evidence from the It: the Beatles song Paperback Writer could be about him. Eleanor Rigby. “Look at him working, writing the words of a sermon no one will hear.” lol! Also, Gottlieb said of his book “it’s not about anything.” Later Seinfeld is called a “show about nothing,” by way of saying it wasn’t really that.
Whoa, what?
I am from New Orleans, btw, but I went to Xavier, a historically black school, because I am able to pass as black
How can someone pass as black? ‘Passing’ is usually the other way around. Why would you go to a historically black school if not black? And did you actually tell students there that you were black – and did they buy it completely? Or did most know you weren’t? Did you imply to employers that you’re black (to benefit from affirmative action)? Lastly, what was it like at this school – the courses, the students, etc? Is this what made you sympathetic to prowhite activism and scholarship?
This sounds like it has the making of a great first person account of ‘passing’. Maybe you should write up your experiences and impressions.
BTW, I read a library copy of Confederacy in the 90s. I recall liking it very much at the time, but I don’t remember much of the plot (was there much?). Comic novels, imo, often are like that – enjoyable, but not memorable (except the memory of having chuckled). Try recounting the “plot” of Tristram Shandy.
I look forward to reading this post after it has escaped the paywall.
I’m half black, but neither parent is fully black.
I’ve not yet taken time to read this book, but after reading this excellent review, I must. What a story!
I am not (yet) behind the paywall, so I was unable to read the post, but the mere title brought a smile to my face. I read A Confederacy of Dunces more than forty years ago and still remember the spectacular cast of characters. That is what a great writer of fiction does, he writes the unforgettable. Mark Twain did that, which is why everybody remembers the characters in Tom Sawyer, no matter how many decades have passed since they read it.
Time to put your money where your mouth is.
That book lives up to the hype. It really is that good.
This is a brilliant review of my favorite novel.
Your analysis of Ignatius as a narcissist with a paranoid streak makes a lot of sense of the novel and rings true to me.
You are also right that Ignatius is a useful mirror to hold up to the movement. In particular, your description of an embittered narcissist with paranoid traits sounds like Eric Striker and Ted Sallis.
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