When I first started doing research on A Confederacy of Dunces, I trudged through all of the Amazon reviews of the book, to see if anyone there had already put forward my ideas about Chaucer's influence on Toole. One of the approximately one thousand reviews argued passionately that Ignatius Reilly was clearly a person with a mental illness. To that reviewer, the book was an extended exercise in laughing at a mentally ill person and his misfortune. Shame on all of us. This perspective is similar to Patteson and Sauret's third Ignatius, as I described in my blog entry of September 1, 2020.
Recently, I had an email exchange with Ron Bell, who wrote a Ph.D. thesis on Confederacy. He mentioned that he does not find the book funny; rather, he sees it as tragic, and because of that, as well as some other reasons, he argues that Toole himself was a nihilist. While I disagree with his overall argument about nihilism, I do agree with Dr. Bell that the reader is encouraged to laugh at Ignatius. Ignatius is ridiculed and expelled from his community, one step ahead of the guys with the straitjackets. To me, the story would be tragic if he were caught and committed, but he is a slapstick hero who, though humiliated, has escaped to bluster another day.
Toole makes Ignatius just preposterous and difficult enough that we join in the laughter at his expense, but as Patteson and Seurat argue, there are three versions of Ignatius. The first is the crusader for theology and geometry, which is how Ignatius describes himself. Then there is the pompous fool, as portrayed by the narrator. But there is a third Ignatius who is emotionally vulnerable and pitiable. Seen from Ignatius's private point of view, as someone who is hiding from the humiliations of the world, one could read Confederacy and not find it funny.
