The Occasional Series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 3

Drug Addict and Drop-out as Saint

Toole possessed both Jack Kerouac's The Subterraneans (Evergreen edition) and Gore Vidal's Thirsty Evil (see Evidence of Influences version 1.2, pages 19 and 39)

In Subterraneans, the junky is described as ascetic or saintly (19) and idealist (21). Leo later describes Wallenstein: "his Christ-like blue unshaven cheeks" and "the same pitiless awful subterranean sort of non-violent Indian Mahatma Gandhi defense of some kind" (105).

The Thirsty Evil is a collection of short stories. In one of the stories, "Three Strategems," the character George is a young man kept for sex by a wealthy older woman, Hilda. He is compared to "an emaciated Christus" and "beneath the taut skin [...] I could see the regular twitchings of his heart" (14)

In another story, "Pages from an Abandoned Journal," the gay drug addict Elliott Magren, whose cheeks are streaked with tears because his eyes are hypersensitive, tells the narrator, Peter, that he has a duty to himself to live in the present. This conversation helps Peter come out of the closet as gay. Elliott is compared to Wilde. When the police arrest Elliott one morning for pedophilia and Elliot asks for Peter's help, Peter denies he knows him. When Elliott dies suddenly years later, it is discovered that he had a malformed heart. "He was buried Christmas Day in the Protestant cemetery close to Shelley" (121). Again, the author seems to portray him as saintly.

Thesis: Confederacy references and uses this tradition of "the drop-out as martyr" when Ignatius meditates on his situation and calls societies failures "the saints of our age" (chapter 9, part 4--page 195 in the 1980 edition of the book). Compare the theme within these three books.