Taping Together the Dunce's Cap

You learnt everything, Ignatius, except how to be a human being. (312)

 A Confederacy of Dunces is a story that seems like it will for a long while remain nonpareil. Both as a story and as a novel, it follows a wide variety of complexly intertwined characters (and in a few occasions, animals) that are all bound to Ignatius Reilly. Sure, the story does have its flaws that may make it seem stretched thin at places, but you may not realize the true extent of the stylistically intertwined plots until you try (keyword: try) and sum it all up for a friend or family member in a way that won't make you sound like you're trying to one-up the writers of Lost. Essentially, the reader comes to understand the host of characters via the richest of characters among them--Ignatius himself. 

    The loose plot of the story follows the growing path of social destruction and discord that Ignatius leaves in his narcissistic path, moving from one source of pleasure to the next with little to no constructive introspection during the milliseconds of these transitions. The looming consequences of his actions start to pile up faster than the receipts of his hot dog budget, which is to say that one expects a rose-tinted and climactic ending full of prosecution, apologies, and personal growth. One expects that, after his three earthly decades of being on the downturn, Ignatius may begin to rise out and away from the gross neglect of his personal deficiencies with new-found accountability and amateur responsibility-taking abound. However, when he is at his lowest point and quite literally laying in a Bourbon Street gutter, the only out and away that he travels from that point in his life is out and away from New Orleans and the reputation he had garnered there. 

Now that Fortuna had saved him from one cycle, where would she spin him now? The new cycle would be so different from anything he had ever known. (337)

     This is the last thought we as readers hear from Ignatius as he is chauffeured in the car of his girlfriend, the equally insufferable Myrna Minkoff, to New York City, narrowly escaping the truck called to bring him to the local mental institute. You see, after learning he may face suit for a brazen and violent letter he forged on behalf of Levy Pant Company CEO Gus Levy, being hunted down by the disgruntled and bloodthirsty ladies' auxiliary to his failed queer revolution-minded Peace Party, and inadvertently helps close down a bar owned by the chief producer of content for a city-wide high school pornography distribution ring, he seems as though he may finally bear the burden for his actions. He spends the day bedridden and indulging in a variety of activities lacking his desired theology and geometry as the phone rings off the hook with calls from concerned community members between his mother's hushed consultations to her sage friend Santa after the story of his convergent downfall is printed as front page news. This depression on his behalf is not hard to understand as one wracked with guilt and anxiety, finally backing him into a corner that seems as though he may not be able to weasel out of this time.

    And yet he does--the liberal-political yin to his medieval catholic yang Myrna Minkoff shows up on his doorstep and he quickly convinces her to bring him back to New York City purely on the pretense that her Freudian inquiries were true and he was ready to begin attending her group therapy sessions. This one of many moments where Ignatius just tells someone exactly what they want to hear in order to get what he wants from them, which is almost always to prevent them from getting anything out of him in general. It stands to show how little Ignatius is willing to change, and how, at the end of the day, he essentially hasn't. He deflects blame, denies responsibility, and even successfully frames his ex-coworker Miss Trixie. His reference to the new cycle of Fortuna's wheel as he leaves the city limits is one of a subtly optimistic uncertainty, but the fact the he lied and cheated his way out of improvement only to abandon any extant disciplinary action seems only a marginal improvement from when he would often wholly ignore it.

    This is point of criticism for the novel; what's the point of writing a character drama when the character essentially remains static? But Ignatius is not just any character. His previously discussed senses of insecurity and hopelessness are deeply seated alongside his general emotional immaturity, creating a wildly unstable and neurotic 30-year-old graduate student living with his mother. This is a major parallel to John Kennedy Toole's own life, being an ambitious author living with his mom despite being well-educated with plenty of potential. In this way, I can see a discussion of worthiness and what it means to improve oneself. 

You’re an overt masochist. Nice treatment will confuse and destroy you. (312)

    By the time Ignatius's actions catch up to him, the extent of his dysfunction makes it seem unlikely that improvement is even possible--and his actions aren't winning him any favors in the improvement department, either. In his wake, the people he affected are left to reflect and re-adjust, but these words don't seem to have much use in Ignatius's vocabulary. The narcissism of his self-hatred collapses into an outward explosion of neurotic behavior, leaving him stuck in a limbo where he has, on some level, convinced himself that he doesn't deserve to get better. In his own mind, why actually criticize yourself when you can simply treat yourself as an outcast, treat yourself as a lonely genius that the common fools are conspiring in confederacy against?

Bibliography

Toole, John K. A Confederacy of Dunces. Baton Rouge and London, Louisiana State University Press, 1980.