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Books Like A Confederacy of Dunces
What to read after A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) is one of the funniest novels in the English language — Ignatius J. Reilly in New Orleans, forcing his massive and inconvenient personality onto a world that has no use for it. If you loved its comedy, its New Orleans atmosphere, and its portrait of a magnificent failure, these novels will find you in the same place.
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Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
The only American comic novel of comparable scale and ambition to A Confederacy of Dunces — Yossarian and Ignatius are the two great comic monsters of postwar American fiction; where Ignatius is a medieval philosopher resisting the modern world, Yossarian is a sane man trying to escape a system that uses sanity as a trap
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Lucky Jim
by Kingsley Amis
Jim Dixon, a junior lecturer at a provincial British university, trying to survive his job without being destroyed by the people above him — the definitive British comic novel of the same postwar period; funnier on its surface than A Confederacy of Dunces but the same fundamental comedy of a person who cannot fit the world they're in
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The Adventures of Augie March
by Saul Bellow
Augie March from Chicago's immigrant neighborhoods through his picaresque adventures across America — Bellow's most expansive and exuberant novel; a different kind of picaresque from Ignatius's New Orleans odyssey, but the same pleasure of following a distinctive voice through a world that keeps resisting and surprising it
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The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
The Lambert family — Alfred with Parkinson's, three adult children in various forms of collapse; Franzen is doing something similar to Toole: creating monstrous, fully realized characters whose awfulness the reader cannot help finding funny; less purely comic than A Confederacy of Dunces but the closest American novel of the 2000s in its satirical ambition
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White Noise
by Don DeLillo
Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler Studies, facing the fear of death — DeLillo's darkest comedy; where Toole's humor comes from the gap between Ignatius's self-image and reality, DeLillo's comedy comes from the gap between the seriousness of what Americans fear and the absurdity of what they use to manage that fear
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Portnoy's Complaint
by Philip Roth
Alexander Portnoy on his analyst's couch, complaining about his mother — Philip Roth's funniest novel and the one closest in spirit to A Confederacy of Dunces: a man whose massive, complicated personality is unsuited to the world he lives in, and who knows it, which makes it both funnier and sadder
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The Death of Ivan Ilyich
by Leo Tolstoy
Not a comedy, but the formal opposite of A Confederacy of Dunces and therefore its essential companion: where Ignatius refuses to confront the fact that his life is a waste, Ivan Ilyich is forced at the moment of death to see that his has been; reading the two together clarifies what Toole is doing with his comic form
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
Arthur Dent, the last human being, trying to survive after the Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass — the British cosmic comedy that bears comparison to A Confederacy of Dunces in its willingness to build a comedy around an outsider who cannot accept the world as it is; lighter and more fantastical, but the same fundamental pleasure
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