A Confederacy of Dunces Reading Order

A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) by John Kennedy Toole is one of the strangest publishing stories in American literary history — a novel written in the early 1960s, rejected by publishers, its author dead by suicide at thirty-one in 1969, and published eleven years later through the obsessive advocacy of Toole's mother Thelma, who drove from publisher to publisher with the manuscript until Louisiana State University Press accepted it. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981. Its subject is Ignatius J. Reilly, a thirty-year-old New Orleans man of vast girth, medieval worldview, and unlimited self-regard who lives with his mother and condemns the entire modern world from his bedroom, emerging only to suffer its indignities with operatic complaints directed at his malfunctioning pyloric valve. Toole's comedy is Rabelaisian — huge, earthy, piling indignity on indignity — and his New Orleans is a fully realized world: the French Quarter bars, the hot dog cart, the department store, the Night of Joy strip club where Burma Jones is forced to work to avoid a 'vagrancy' charge. The novel's structure is picaresque: Ignatius's attempts to hold jobs (at a pants factory, as a hot dog vendor) create the plots that intersect the lives of the surrounding characters. Its comedy of incompetence, self-delusion, and the tragic-comic gap between aspiration and reality places it in the tradition of Cervantes and Sterne.