The Witness of Ignatius Reilly

Ignatius J. Reilly, the antihero of John Kennedy Toole’s posthumous comic novel A Confederacy of Dunces, is usually remembered for his excesses. He is Falstaff shorn of tavern sparkle: a swollen, self-absorbed medievalist in a modern city, living on hot dogs and bile, bellowing against “degeneracy” from under his bedroom sheets. Walker Percy, who midwifed A Confederacy of Dunces into print, called him “slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one.” It is hard to imagine a less likely candidate for sainthood. Half a century on, the novel remains worth reading for the exuberance of its invention. It is, in its way, a parable of transmission, in which a weighty inheritance is carried—miscarried, even—through an age that no longer quite knows what it has been handed.