Ignatius J. Reilly is a gas bag – literally and figuratively.

An enormous man railing against the injustices of the world – such as having to find a job and movie musicals which he attends regularly to yell at the screen. He scribbles his philosophies on life, history and humanity in his Big Chief tablets from the cloister of his bedroom in his put-upon mother’s New Orleans house. 

He tries leading a failed revolution at the pants factory where he works. He works as a hotdog vendor who eats more than he sells. He has a tempestuous pen-pal relationship with the mercurial Myrna Minkoff.

Ignatius P. Reilly is the Falstaffian protagonist of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” – a book with a back story as strange as the novel itself, as satirically tragic as the book is satirically hysterical.

Toole wrote the book back in the late 1960s. Following a pile of rejection notices, Toole, depressed, killed himself. Several years later, Toole’s mother carried the tattered manuscript to various people she thought could get it published. 

Writer Walker Percy was teaching at Loyola in 1976 when Mrs. Toole pestered him to a point he finally agreed to look at the ragged collection of pages. Percy planned to only read a few pages to say he had given it a shot. But he kept reading. He loved it.

Percy shepherded the book through a tortuous process to publication but “A Confederacy of Dunces” was published. In 1981, the book won the Pulitzer Prize.

I first read the book in the mid-1990s. It was hilarious then and still is today. 

Ignatius holds contempt for everyone; he looks down on all mankind as unworthy but in great need of his genius. It is satire in the classical tradition of Voltaire’s “Candide.” “Dunces” is politically incorrect, especially in this era, and those easily offended should avoid the book.

For readers looking for an oddball character and his calamitous misadventures, “A Confederacy of Dunces” is a triumph.