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• W334837881 abstract "As Walker Percy reminds us in his introduction, John Kennedy Toole's novel, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), transports the medieval picaresque tradition to modern-day New Orleans, complete with allegorical settings and a picaro who gigantic seizures of flatulence and eructations is filling dozens of Big Chief tablets with invective (12). In fact there are elements of the picaresque in the novel, for as Edwin Muir points out in his classic, The Structure of the Novel, the picaresque novel take[s] a central figure through a succession of scenes, introduce[s] a great number of characters, and thus build[s] us a picture of society.... and in the picaresque novel, ancient and modern, there is generally an attempt to provide information such as a social student, or a moralist, or an intelligent newspaper would give (32-33). Certainly this description covers much of the action of Toole's novel, but to accept it as totality undercuts his intent and the book's underlying philosophical structure. Indeed, its tie to the medieval links the novel with a compendium of medieval types--the pilgrimage, the quest, in strange ways the romance, the anatomy--and it does so in the most medieval of ways: the allegory, or more accurately the allegory within an allegory. In creating this double perspective, Toole has drawn from the intellectual and artistic fabric of the Middle Ages to comment on the contemporary world, melding the underpinnings of medieval thought to the contexts of modern reality. Consequently, as Percy notes, in Ignatius Reilly Toole offers us a grotesque anti-hero--indeed a slob extraordinary (12)--who speaks to us as a picaro/questor/pilgrim ironically trailing disaster after him in the wrecks he makes of other people's lives and who ultimately must be rescued from his own folly instead of rescuing those in danger. Yet, ironically he sees himself as his own Boethius--in history an inhabitant of two worlds who was revered as the depository of classical learning and as the educator of the modern world (Male, 93)--and Ignatius, too, strives Boethius-like to fit his own idiosyncratic view into the context of the late twentieth century, the timeframe to which he is consigned. Overlaying the entirety of Ignatius's perspective and his voice is Toole's own, pronouncing in different terms a consolation of sorts--his version of the only kind of consolation available for the modern age. The humor in the novel, and it exists in abundance, derives from the panorama of incongruities between action and expectations with which Toole permeates the novel. Toole spotlights the idiosyncratic nature of Ignatius Reilly's perspective on reality and balances it with the equally chronocentric--and culturally idiosyncratic--perspective of the modern reader. Clearly elements of a classical definition of irony, those incongruities arise inevitably from the clash of two mutually-exclusive views existing concurrently in the novel: Ignatius's chosen and believed medieval view and the reader's inherited and fondly-held contemporary view, the two of which converge and diverge throughout the events of the novel. Indeed, Ignatius's central position in the novel focuses attention on this duality of perspective, for the readers' interpretation of Ignatius--hence our sympathy and empathy for his actions--depends to large extent on whether we read him allegorically as a medievalist might or literally as the contemporary reader is wont to do. By nature, at least to the modern reader, Ignatius is not an easy person to love; hence, he is not a protagonist who easily gains our empathy. He is lazy, abusive, self-centered, and a troublemaker and thus is intensely disliked by his companions; however, he is also the insecure, child-like, desperate dreamer who acts out his dreams and who finds protectors at every twist of his fate. To the medievalist, or at least in allegorical tradition, he is also the questor/picaro, perhaps like most a bit of a rogue, a non-conformist, a rabble rouser. …" @default.
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• W334837881 date "1988-09-22" @default.
• W334837881 modified "2023-09-23" @default.
• W334837881 title "The Clash of World Views in John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces" @default.
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