A Confederacy of Dunces: Book Review
About 15 years ago I read an article on Cracked.com about the funniest books ever written. The number one winner they had was called a confederacy of dunces. My personal favourite comedy is catch 22, which was ranked below it. So I always remembered the name. Now recently I’ve been wanting to read a comedy book so I finally got around to Confederacy.
John Kennedy Toole wrote the book in 1963, but it was only published eleven years after his in 1980. He posthumously got the Pullitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. It is now considered a canonical work of modern literature of the Southern United States.
The main character Ignatius J. Reilly is partly based on one of Toole’s professors, but also on himself. He is eccentric, idealistic, and creative, often to the point of delusion. He’s also massively incredibly obnoxious, and he made me hate him in the way you can only hate a well-written character. Also he’s morbidly obese, which I suppose is intended to fuel the physical comedy. This was a time when the three stooges were still big.
Class
Ignatius lives with his mother. He’s got eight years of university behind him. His mother spent most of her inheritance putting him through it. Unfortunately, he’s too misanthropic and slothful to do anything with that education, so he spends his days in his room writing critiques of society.
After his mother has a drunk driving accident, money becomes a problem, and he’s forced to get a job. The book follows his misadventures, where he constantly tries to get as little as possible done of the actual work he’s hired for, and instead tries to manipulate the work to suit him. He wants to do nothing, get paid for it, tell everybody they’re idiots and then be called a genius. If this had been 2025 he’d be an incel.
This is guy is exhausting. Anyone who is mean to him causes him extreme trauma and is threatened with a lawsuit. Anything that is not to his liking is the worst thing in the world. There’s a cast of characters who interact with him and bring the story to its culmination.
There are no likeable characters really, and it reminds me a bit of it’s always sunny in Philadelphia – in that there are a group of terrible people, with some less terrible people around them, and just knowing the terrible people can ruin your life. The “innocents” in the story do get a few happy endings, but all in all, life is hard for them. Especially for the ones who aren’t white.
I don’t really have much more to say about this story. I believe the other reviews that call it a faithful depiction of the American south in the sixties. But that’s not something that makes me automatically enjoy a book. I read this because I was looking for a comedy. This was not the funniest book I’ve ever read. Not even close, so it was a bit of a disappointment in that regard. But it’s not bad, and it has its moments, in between the really depressing self-sabotage you constantly see in main cast. I’ll give it a 6.5 out of ten, but I’ll say that if you’re interested in the American South especially the dialects, you’d probably rate it higher.
