We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. The atmosphere of decay adds a discordant undertone to the comedy, and there are disquieting insights into the hypocrisy and discrimination lurking behind the city’s grinning carnival mask.We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice.

Orbiting around him are the dunces, the eccentric inhabitants of a splendidly described low-life New Orleans.

He is drawn into a series of misunderstandings and misadventures as he struggles to deal with the horrors of modern life. Intent on spending his time in his bedroom, binge-eating, ranting, and recording his musings on a jumbled pile of writing pads, he is forced, through an unfortunate turn in circumstances, to venture out into the world of work. Reilly, a man of huge appetites and extraordinary erudition. “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” The quote is by the satirist Jonathan Swift, and the unlikely genius at the center of Toole’s grotesquely comic novel is the corpulent Ignatius J. SpaceNext50 Britannica presents SpaceNext50, From the race to the Moon to space stewardship, we explore a wide range of subjects that feed our curiosity about space!Ī Confederacy of Dunces, comic novel by John Kennedy Toole, published in 1980.Learn about the major environmental problems facing our planet and what can be done about them! Saving Earth Britannica Presents Earth’s To-Do List for the 21st Century.100 Women Britannica celebrates the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, highlighting suffragists and history-making politicians.COVID-19 Portal While this global health crisis continues to evolve, it can be useful to look to past pandemics to better understand how to respond today.

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A confederacy of dunces book review