A Confederacy of Dunces

What's in this book, at a glance — five things readers want to know before they start.

What this book is about

Ignatius J. Reilly is thirty years old, obese, still living with his mother, devoted to Boethius, contemptuous of modernity, and convinced that the world has gone catastrophically wrong. When a minor incident forces him to actually seek employment, he descends into the working life of New Orleans like a medieval philosopher into chaos. John Kennedy Toole's posthumous Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is one of the great comic characters in American fiction — a man whose self-regard is matched only by his obliviousness, and whose misadventures expose the absurdity of every institution he enters. The novel is broadly satirical, bawdy, and driven entirely by character.