Taking place in the early 1960’s, John Kennedy Toole’s famous novel A Confederacy of Dunces follows the misadventures of Ignatius G. Reilly- an obese, lethargic slob- as he interacts with the many characters that inhabit the New Orleans of that time. Many of his misadventures revolve around his working experiences and the ways he finds to avoid doing any work that doesn’t benefit his own ideologies. He possesses many interesting qualities, such as extreme obesity, a disdain for modern society, and severe laziness. These qualities come together to make Ignatius a rather comical character. Ignatius’s laziness attaches a high level of comedy to his character. Whenever he is not in a state of employment, Ignatius spends most of his time in his …show more content…
Ignatius constantly regards modern society as a sinful and disgusting entity and constantly depicts medieval culture as the ideal for all of society. Ignatius’s basic worldview was that “possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person's lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one’s soul”(1), Ignatius constantly talks about how awful society has become since the breakdown of medieval culture. While he was living unemployed with his mother, he wrote down in one of his Big Chief tablets that “with the breakdown of the Medieval system, the gods of Chaos, Lunacy, and Bad Taste gained ascendancy”(28). He does not simply keep these thoughts to himself, however. “Had you ‘artists’ had a part in the decoration of the Sistine Chapel, it would have ended up looking like a particularly vulgar train terminal,” Ignatius announced to a group of women displaying their art, which did not appeal to Ignatius’s acute sense of symmetry and geometry(244). Much of his time is spent at the movie theater, where he screams loudly over new films, declaring their distastefulness and perversion. During one particular viewing, Ignatius screamed many insults at the film being played, such as “This is going to be worse than I thought,” and, “What degenerate produced this abortion?”(56, 57) Ignatius’s disdain for all things modern while his being in favor of an antiquated system of thinking makes him a very comical character by all