The Occasional Series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 1

The Sexual Neophyte

In an article which Toole wrote for Tulane's student literary magazine, he stated that Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye "continues to be one of the finest books of its type ever written." He then recommended a parody of the novel by Turner that appeared in Playboy magazine in July 1956 called "Catcher in the Wry." (See Evidence of Influences, page 17.) That parody features a sexually inexperienced youth who is tricked out of money while he is trying to hire a prostitute.

In the bibliography of Toole's library (Evidence of Influences, 4), there is a novel by Gover entitled One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, which also features a sexually inexperienced man's misadventures in the world of prostitutes.

Thesis: Compare and contrast Ignatius Reilly's failure to rescue his imagined Boethian scholar and the failures in the Gover book and the Turner story.