He utterly loathes the world around him, which he feels has lost the values of geometry and theology.
Ignatius Jacques Reilly is an overweight and unemployed thirty-year-old with a master's degree in Medieval History who lives with his mother, Irene Reilly. Both of these experiences were later adopted into his fiction.
While at Tulane, Toole filled in for a friend at a job as a hot tamale cart vendor, and worked at a family owned and operated clothing factory. The character was also based on Toole himself, and several personal experiences served as inspiration for passages in the novel. Byrne's slovenly, eccentric behavior was anything but professorial, and Reilly mirrored him in these respects. Toole based Reilly in part on his college professor friend Bob Byrne. It is hailed for its accurate depictions of New Orleans dialects. Toole wrote the novel in 1963 during his last few months in Puerto Rico. He is an educated but slothful 30-year-old man living with his mother in the Uptown neighborhood of early-1960s New Orleans who, in his quest for employment, has various adventures with colorful French Quarter characters. Reilly, a lazy, obese, misanthropic, self-styled scholar.
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."ĭunces is a picaresque novel featuring the misadventures of protagonist Ignatius J. Published through the efforts of writer Walker Percy (who also 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 considered a canonical work of modern literature of the Southern United States. A Confederacy of Dunces is a picaresque novel by American novelist John Kennedy Toole which reached publication in 1980, eleven years after Toole's death.
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