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A Confederacy of Dunces is a novel by American writer John Kennedy Toole that was published in 1980, 11 years after Toole's death. Published through the efforts of writer Walker Percy (who contributed a foreword) and Toole's mother, Thelma, the book became first a cult classic, then a mainstream success; it earned Toole a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981 and is now a canonical work of modern literature of the Southern United States.The book's title refers to an epigram from Jonathan Swift's essay Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." Dunces is a picaresque novel featuring the misadventures of protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly, a lazy, obese, misanthropic, self-styled scholar. He is an educated but slothful 30-year-old living with his mother in the Uptown neighborhood of early-1960s New Orleans. In his quest for employment, he has adventures with colorful French Quarter characters. Toole wrote the first draft in 1963 during his last few months in Puerto Rico. Critics liked the accurate depictions of New Orleans dialects. Toole based Reilly in part on his professor friend Bob Byrne. Byrne's slovenly, eccentric behavior was anything but professorial. Reilly resembled Toole; Toole's experiences served as inspiration for episodes. While at Tulane University, Toole filled in for a friend as a hot-tamale cart vendor and worked for a family who owned and operated a clothing factory. Synopsis Ignatius Jacques Reilly is an overweight and unemployed 30-year-old with a master's degree in Medieval History. He lives with his mother, Irene Reilly. He loathes the world, which he feels has lost the values of geometry and theology. One afternoon Reilly's mother drives him "downtown in the old Plymouth, and while she was at the doctor's seeing about her arthritis, Ignatius had bought some sheet music at Werlein's for his trumpet and a new string for his lute." While Reilly waits for his mother, Officer Angelo Mancuso approaches Reilly and demands that Ignatius produce identification. Affronted and outraged by Mancuso's zeal and officiousness, Reilly protests his innocence to the crowd while denouncing the city's vices and the graft of the local police. An elderly man, Claude Robichaux, takes Reilly's side and denounces Mancuso and the police as communists. In the resulting uproar, Mancuso arrests Robichaux while Reilly and his embarrassed mother escape and take refuge in a bar. There, Mrs. Reilly drinks too much. On the way home, she crashes her car. The bills for the accident total $1,020, a sizable amount of money in early 1960s New Orleans and which would be a little over $10,000 in 2023. To help his mother pay for the accident, Ignatius must work for the first time in years. What follows is a series of adventures that introduce characters and their interactions as Ignatius flounders from one low-wage job to another. Ignatius obsesses over his wardrobe, verbally abuses his mother, and frequents movie theaters, where he condemns the actors and actresses. The novel explores the psyche of a man who, every time he feels stress, observes the action of his pyloric valve. Reilly maintains an adversarial relationship, and possibly a flirtation, with the politically liberal Myrna Minkoff, his only friend from college. Major characters Ignatius J. Reilly Ignatius Jacques Reilly is something of a modern Don Quixote—eccentric, idealistic, and creative, sometimes to the point of delusion. In his foreword to the book, Walker Percy describes Ignatius as a "slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one". He disdains modernity, particularly pop culture. The disdain becomes his obsession: he goes to movies in order to mock their perversity and express his outrage with the contemporary world's lack of "theology and geometry". He prefers the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages, and the Early Medieval philosopher Boethius in particular. However, he also enjoys many modern comforts and conveniences and is given to claiming that the rednecks of rural Louisiana hate all modern technology, which they associate with unwanted change. The workings of his pyloric valve play an important role in his life, reacting strongly to incidents in a fashion that he likens to Cassandra in terms of prophetic significance.Ignatius believes he does not belong in the world and that his failings are the work of some higher power. He refers to the goddess Fortuna as having spun him downward on her wheel of fortune. Ignatius loves to eat; his masturbatory fantasies lead in strange directions. His mockery of obscene images is portrayed as a defensive posture to hide their titillating effect on him. Although considering himself to have an expansive and learned worldview, Ignatius has an aversion to ever leaving the town of his birth and frequently bores friends and strangers with the story of his abortive journey out of New Orleans, to Baton Rouge on a Greyhound Scenicruiser, which Ignatius recounts as a traumatic ordeal of extreme horror. Myrna Minkoff Myrna Minkoff, referred to by Ignatius as "that minx," is a Jewish beatnik from New York City. Ignatius met her while she was in college in New Orleans. Although their political, social, religious, and personal orientations could hardly be more different, Myrna and Ignatius fascinate one another. The novel refers to Myrna and Ignatius as having engaged in tag-team attacks on the teachings of professors. For most of the novel, she is seen only in the regular correspondence which the two sustain after her return to New York, a correspondence heavily weighted with sexual analysis from Myrna and contempt for her apparent sacrilegious activity by Ignatius. Officially, they deplore everything the other stands for. Although neither will admit it, their correspondence indicates that, separated though they are by half a continent, they want to impress each other. Irene Reilly Mrs. Irene Reilly is Ignatius's mother. She has been widowed for 21 years. At first, she allows Ignatius his space and drives him where he needs to go, but over the course of the novel she learns to stand up for herself. She has a drinking problem, most frequently indulging in muscatel, although Ignatius exaggerates that she is a raving, abusive drunk.She falls for Claude Robichaux, who has a railroad pension and rental properties. At the end of the novel, she decides she will marry Claude. But first, she agrees with Santa Battaglia (who has not only recently become Mrs. Reilly's new best friend, but also harbors an intense dislike for Ignatius) that Ignatius is insane and arranges to have him sent to a mental hospital. Others Santa Battaglia, a "grammaw" who is friends with Mrs. Reilly and has a marked disdain for Ignatius Claude Robichaux, an old man constantly on the lookout for any "communiss" who migh.... Discover the K D Robichaux popular books. Find the top 100 most popular K D Robichaux books.