a confederacy of dunces by john kennedy toole 1980

The novel itself, like its characters, had a heap of trouble finding a place. Nut soft drink that Ignatius adores-will give you gas. All the nuts are cracked, and most of them-like the Dr.

On the contrary, just about everyone in the novel is out of place in their own way, and this book pictures the funky, oddball city of New Orleans as a kind of island of misfit toys. No one, as he says, understands 'the grandeur of my physique the complexity of my worldview.' (9.190) On the other hand, though, Ignatius isn't all that unique. On the one hand, the fact that Ignatius cannot be contained is a sign of his uniqueness. So when he is hired to file, he throws out the files, and when he is hired to be a hot dog vendor, well, he eats the hot dogs. The novel consists of people trying to shove him into one nutshell after another (these nutshells often look like jobs), and watching him wriggle enormously out of them. Ignatius's refusal to be contained in a nutshell is not just a matter of girth, though, and his stubbornness matches his bulk. When he 'shifts from one hip to another in his lumbering elephantine fashion waves of flesh' (1.2) roll and belch, causing nutshells to weep and fracture from sheer frustration. Reilly-and Ignatius is a very big fellow indeed. The biggest reason the novel is hard to fit in a nutshell, though, is because so much of it deals with Ignatius J. In part, this is because the novel is picaresque, meaning it's a bunch of episodic adventures sprawling across the (mostly) seedier side of New Orleans. It's hard to get A Confederacy of Dunces in a nutshell.

A confederacy of dunces by john kennedy toole 1980