Confederacy of Dunces is such a great book that I feel unworthy of trying to describe it. This is a description by Alix Wilber, which will hopefully lure you into reading this classic comedy masterpiece.

This book was originally written in the early sixties but was only published in through the persistence of the author's mother after he had committed suicide in 1969 at the age of thirty two. A confederacy of dunces work won the Pulitzer Prize a year after it was first published in 1981.

This wasn't a book I was likely to pick up in a bookshop but a work pal handed it over suspecting that it will remind me of a hero of mine. If I ever have the pleasure to meet Seth MacFarlane this will be the first thing I ask him: Where you ever inspired by this book when you created Stewie Griffin? It's a pity that John Toole isn't with us anymore; Ignatius J. Reilly deserved to live longer than the Disc World Series. 5/5

As much as it deserves it, it would have taken too long to retype the whole book here, so these are just few quotes to give you a teaser of the book. (References to pages are to the Penguin Books edition)

Some Quotes

[Part of the letter sent by Ignatius to Abelman (Mongoloid, Esq.)] We are a busy and dynamic organization whose mission needless effrontery and harassment can only hinder. If you molest us again, sir, you may feel the sting of the lash across your pitiful shoulders. Pg. 89

… I avoid that bleak first hour of the working day during which my still sluggish senses and body make ever chore a penance. I find that in arriving later, the work which I do perform is of a much higher quality. Pg. 99

… my mother's cataclysmic intemperance has thrust me into the world in the most cavalier manner; my system is still in a state of flux. Therefore, I am still in the process of adapting myself to the tension of the working world. Pg. 100

Social Note: I have sought escape in the Prytania on more than one occasion, pulled by the attractions of some technicolored horrors, filmed abortions that were offenses against any criteria of taste and decency, reels and reels of perversion and blasphemy that stunned my disbelieving eyes, the shocked my virginal mind, and sealed my valve.

My mother is currently associating with some undesirables who are attempting to transform her into an athlete of sorts, deprave specimens of mankind who regularly bowl their way to oblivion. Pg. 101

I do admire the terror which Negroes are able to inspire in the hearts of some members of the white proletariat and only wish (This is a rather personal confession.) that I possessed the ability to similarly terrorize. The Negro terrorizes simply by being himself; I however, must browbeat a bit in order to achieve the same end. Perhaps I should have been a Negro. I suspect that I would have been a rather large and terrifying one, continually pressing my ample thigh against the withered thighs of old white ladies in public conveyances a great deal and eliciting more than one shriek of panic. Then, too, if I were a Negro, I would not be pressured by my mother to find a good job, for no good jobs would be available. Pg. 123

… deriving from a history of our nation as written from the perspective if a subway tunnel. Pg. 126

[Part of the letter sent to Dr. Talc] Pray to him, you deluded fool, you 'anyone for tennis?' golf playing, cocktail-quaffing pseudo-pedant, for you do indeed need a heavenly patron. Although your days are numbered, you will not die as a martyr – for you further no holy cause – but as the total ass which you really are. Pg. 130

Apparently I lack some particular perversion which today's employer is seeking. Pg. 156

'So that's who that obvious appendage of officialdom was. He looked like an arm of the bureaucracy. You can always tell employees of the government by the total vacancy which occupies the space where most other people have faces. Pg. 208

However, various small bones and ligaments are beginning to wave a white flag of surrender. My physical apparati seem to be preparing to announce a truce of some sort. My digestive system has almost ceased functioning altogether. Some tissue has perhaps grown over my pyloric valve, sealing it forever. Pg. 211

… the more alert of the reading public will benefit from my account of that abysmal sojourn into the swamps to the inner station of the ultimate horror. Pg. 212

This liberal doxy must be impaled upon the member of a particularly large stallion. Pg. 216

This, I should have known, was too much for his literal and sausage-like mind. … We lunged about in the garage like tow swashbucklers in an especially inept historical film for several moments, fork and cutlass clicking against each other madly. Realizing that my plastic weapon was hardly a match for a long fork wielded by a maddened Methuselah … Pg. 230

Like a bitch in heat, I seem to attract a coterie of policemen and sanitation officials. Pg 232

'Filth!' Ignatius shouted, spewing wet popcorn over several rows. 'How dare she pretend to be a virgin. Look at her degenerate face. Rape her!' Pg 293

… My respiratory system, unfortunately, is below par. I suspect that I am the result of particularly weak conception on the part of my father. His sperm was probably emitted in a rather offhand manner. Pg. 298

… your type isn't even in the psychology books. Pg 359

[To his mother] 'It's not your fate to be well treated,' Ignatius cried. 'You're an overt masochist. Nice treatment will confuse and destroy you. Pg. 367

'Mother, I must attend to my bowels. They are revolting against the trauma of the last twenty-four hours. Pg. 368

Fortuna had relented. She was not depraved enough to end this vicious cycle by throttling him in a straitjacket, by sealing him up in a cement block tomb lighted by florescent tubes. Fortuna wished to make amends. Somehow she had summoned and flushed Myrna minx from a subway tube, from some picket line, for the pungent bed of some Eurasian existentialist, from the hands of some epileptic Negro Buddhist, from the verbose midst of a group therapy session. Pg. 389

She's out somewhere failing her blood test at the moment. Pg 390