Another Single Case Test of Two AI LLMs: Infinite Jest and Steven Pinker

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include other topics like AI chatbot testing. This blog entry is another one that gives a case study of AI testing.

A friend of mine introduced me to the writings of Steven Pinker thirty years ago. Pinker’s groundbreaking The Language Instinct was published in 1994. This summer, I have been enjoying David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest, which was published in 1996. I discovered in the footnotes to the novel (yes, this thousand page novel has footnotes) a humorous reference to Steven Pinker.

I mentioned this fact to my friend a couple of months ago. He decided to query ChatGPT, to see if it could retrieve accurate information about the reference. As usual, ChatGPT was full of poppycock. I decided to run two queries in ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, respectively, and Gemini returned accurate information. Below are the two test queries and their results in the different services.

Q1: In the novel Infinite Jest, what event causes the MIT language riot of 1997?

1.A. ChatGPT said:

In David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, the MIT language riot of 1997 is caused by a public lecture on the theoretical implications of the Incandenza family's "samizdat" film [VL: not true]—a film so entertaining that it renders viewers completely catatonic due to their inability to look away or stop watching. [The fictional film in the novel that causes viewers to become catatonic is sometimes referred to as "the samizdat," but its formal name is "Infinite Jest." But a discussion of that film is not what causes the riot.]

Specifically, the riot breaks out at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when a linguistic theorist gives a talk about the film's potential effects on communication, semiotics, and the limits of language. The lecture attracts radical theorists and academics, many of whom have divergent and extreme interpretations. The confrontation between competing linguistic camps escalates into chaos, culminating in what becomes known as the MIT language riot. [This is vaguely true with no names or specific details.]

The event is one of many satirical moments in Infinite Jest that lampoon the excesses of academia, the fragmentation of intellectual discourse, and the cultural obsession with entertainment and theory.

1.B. Gemini Said:

In David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, the MIT language riot of 1997 is attributed to a public debate between Steven Pinker and Avril M. Incandenza (Hal Incandenza's mother) on the political implications of prescriptive grammar. This debate occurred during a convention of the "Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts" and is credited with helping to incite the riots. [VL: Accurate.]

Q2: Is Steven Pinker mentioned in the novel Infinite Jest?

2.A. ChatGPT said:

Yes, Steven Pinker is mentioned in Infinite Jest.

David Foster Wallace references Pinker in a tongue-in-cheek, satirical manner as part of a broader critique of academia and intellectual culture. In one passage, Wallace refers to a linguistics professor with “hair like Steven Pinker” [VL: not true] — a nod to Pinker’s famously voluminous hair and his prominence in the field of linguistics and cognitive science.

The mention is brief and more caricature than critique, but it fits with the novel’s dense tapestry of cultural, academic, and intellectual references. Wallace often peppers real-life figures into Infinite Jest to lend texture to the world, blur the lines between fiction and reality, and satirize the intellectual elite. [VL: Vague statements that could have been written by a student who didn't read the assignment.]

2.B. Gemini said:

Yes, Steven Pinker is indeed mentioned in Infinite Jest. He appears in the novel's filmography, specifically in a documentary titled "Union Of Theoretical Grammarians In Cambridge." This documentary features interviews with participants in a public debate between Steven Pinker and Avril M. Incandenza (Hal's mother) on the "political implications of prescriptive grammar." This debate is famously credited with helping to incite the MIT language riots of B.S. 1997. [VL: Accurate.]

Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. This blog entry relates to the theory of cultural evolution which is persuasively argued by Joseph Henrich.

The whole point of trying to tie literary criticism to evolutionary psychology is to try to develop a framework for studying literature that is built on the most accurate model for describing human psychology and social behavior. Scholars in the humanities often take an attitude that is dismissive of scientific knowledge. I have borrowed the Calvin Thomas's term antiphysis to describe this attitude. I interpret antiphysis as anti-physics, or anti-science. Evolutionary literary criticism takes the opposite approach.

I do not want to diminish the problems with making any serious claims to scientific knowledge. Many critics of science study and emphasize perfectly valid concerns. At the same time, I don't want to make too much of the problems with scientific knowledge, which is what the antiphysis crowd does. Some critics dismiss science entirely. Others don't dismiss it entirely but minimize its legitimate claims.

What are some claims that I consider established scientific facts? For one, genes exist. The phenotype of an organism is in fact related to its genotype. Another big one: the laws of thermodynamics hold throughout the universe. Entropy happens. Because of entropy, if present trends continue, in the long run, all action will cease.

Central to this effort to add some scientific knowledge to the discussion of literature is the question of human nature. What can we say scientifically about human nature? That question immediately pulls the ponderer into the maelstrom of politics about what we want humans to be. Robert Sapolsky entitled a chapter in his book Behave, "Hobbes or Rousseau?" as a shorthand for disagreements over human nature. This topic is fraught with sharp disagreements ...

Back to cultural evolution. Two years ago, I listened to the Audible version of the book The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution ... by Joseph Henrich (2015). I think his approach, which is descended from the ideas of Boyd and Richerson (not Richardson), offers a better foundation of how the human mind has evolved than the approach of many other evolutionary psychologists. I have not yet fully studied the book in detail, so anything I would say would be general in nature.

However, Henrich neatly shows that many of the theories that form the basis of evolutionary psychology are insufficient to explain how we humans invaded nearly every terrestrial ecosystem on the planet even before we developed modern industry, or even agriculture with its domestication of species.

Henrich demonstrates the inadequacies of many thinkers toward whom I am partial: for example, Tooby and Cosmides and their reliance on general intelligence, Steven Pinker and his theory of many mental modules, and David Sloan Wilson and his focus on prosociality through multilevel selection. Henrich further shows that Robin Dunbar's "social brain hypothesis" does not explain our success. Instead, he builds his theory on the foundation of "cultural learning."

Here is a statement in the book that summarizes its thesis: "The central argument in this book is that relatively early in our species' evolutionary history, perhaps around the origins of our genus (Homo) about 2 million years ago, we first crossed this evolutionary Rubicon, at which point cultural evolution became the primary driver of our species' genetic evolution" (57).

The point is that humans distribute the storage of information which is important to our survival across the collective brain of a culture rather than in any one individual human's brain. Because of that cultural knowledge and collective intelligence, our human nature is to prefer following the practices and customs of our social groups over following the path suggested by our personal experience and what seems to be our own immediate self-interest.

If this strong drive to embrace culture is true (and it seems that it is), then naive versions of evolutionary self-interest do not provide an adequate foundation upon which we can analyze the themes and mechanisms of literature. The process of literature is all about creating and preserving stories that the listeners/readers of that literature deeply value, which creates a shared sense of community. If putting a premium on cultural learning over genetic self-interest is how human mind's are built, then analyzing literature strictly from the framework of genetic self-interest should be woefully inadequate.

In my own thinking, I have supported the idea promoted by David Sloan Wilson that prosociality evolves through the group selection component of multilevel selection. Cultural evolution takes a different angle on the problem of prosociality. We humans depend on the collective knowledge of our cultures to survive. In order to amass the cultural knowledge necessary for cultural evolution, we have to be prosocial. The mechanisms of the group selection theories of Bowles and Gintis and E. O. Wilson can be rather red in tooth and claw (or spear and hand axe). The cultural evolution of Boyd and Richerson (and Henrich) might be less necessarily violent. Perhaps Bowles, Gintis, and Wilson lean more toward Hobbes, while Boyd, Richerson, and Henrich lean more toward Rousseau. I am not yet sure; I am still working on it.

My advice: If you want to pursue evolutionary literary criticism, study Henrich and his cultural evolution hypothesis and try to incorporate it into your framework for approaching literature. I currently think that this theory offers a more solid foundation for understanding human nature than the other, competing evolutionary explanations. That is, study Henrich if you want to interpret our works of literature using the most accurate theory regarding the nature of those organisms who are creating and treasuring the literature in question. (In the humanities, that's a big if.)

Solaris #6: Csicsery-Ronay's perspective on the Chaosphere

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include other topics. This blog entry relates to a different topic.

My current research interest is the novel Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. I will not yet post my overall thesis for the project, but I am learning things along the way which are tangential to my thesis and which I can share.

Article discussed: Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr. "Modeling the Chaosphere: Stanislaw Lem's Alien Communications." In N. Katherine Hayles (Ed), Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science. (U. of Chicago Press, 1991), 244-62.

Last month, I discussed an article in which Istvan Csicsery-Ronay discussed his views on the political context within which science fiction operates and where Lem's work fits into that context. This month's topic is another essay by Csicsery-Ronay, one that is fifteen years older than the essay I discussed last month. This essay discusses three Lem texts: Solaris (1961), His Master's Voice (1968), and Fiasco (1986).

Csicsery-Ronay studies Lem's theme of the inability of humans to communicate with aliens. To Csicsery-Ronay, Lem's major theme in his later work is the problem of "carousel reasoning," in which the thinker cannot escape from the logical system in which the premises and conclusions are trapped. Csicsery-Ronay calls this bubble of circular reasoning the chaosphere.

For the humans, the goal is to break through the chaosphere to have true knowledge. The humans have two possible paths in this attempt: either to build a system of order that is all encompassing or to embrace randomness as a way to escape the limitations of ordered models. (This choice almost sounds like Thomas Pynchon's theme of order versus chaos, order, which is associated with the death instinct and chaos, which is life-affirming.) The effort to communicate with aliens is a metaphor for a dialectic between order and chaos.

Csicsery-Ronay argues that Lem's three alien contact novels grow increasingly toward a postmodern perspective. In Solaris, the world-ocean can reach into the minds of the humans on the station and create visitors who reflect some of their inner memories and feelings. Attempts to understand the enigmatic ocean generate a large scientific literature of Solaristics, but it goes nowhere. The breakthrough of the chaosphere is effected by the world-ocean, and it is achieved by the visitor-Rheya.

In His Master's Voice, the focus is on what appears to be a message from aliens. One cannot be certain that it is actually a message. Perhaps it is a message from the universe itself. It is more postmodern than Solaris, because it presents the problem of knowledge as a problem of language. Is the text a text? Was there a sender?

Csicsery-Ronay sees Fiasco as completing the depiction of carousel reasoning. In this novel, both the humans and the aliens display an "aggressive self-consciousness" (259). There is no wise alien who is superior to humans and whom the humans cannot harm. Instead, contact degenerates into war and the destruction of the aliens.

I have not read the latter two Lem novels, so I have no opinion about Csicsery-Ronay's interpretation of them. As for Solaris, Csicsery-Ronay insists that "the uncertainty Visitor-Rheya creates cannot be resolved" (252). He sees two mutually incompatible readings: first, a romance of contact with a superrational alien, and second, "an ironic, self-deconstructing satire of it." For myself, I don't think they are mutually incompatible. The contact with the wise, all-knowing alien is consistent with the inability of the humans to actually understand that contact. The alien of Solaris seems to understand us, even if we cannot understand it.

Solaris #5: Science Fiction, Utopia, and Empire

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include other topics, including evolutionary literary criticism. This blog entry relates to a different topic.

One of my current research interests is the novel Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. I will not yet post my overall thesis for the project, but I am learning things along the way which are tangential to my thesis and which I can share.

Today's topic is the essay: Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. "Lem, Central Europe, and the Genre of Technological Empire." In Peter Swirski (Ed), The Art and Science of Stanislaw Lem. (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006), 130-152.

This monograph of essays on Lem came from the first North American conference on Lem's philosophical and cultural legacy. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay is one of the more incisive and more heavily cited Lem scholars. I do not know his background, but this essay seems to come from the perspective of mid-20th century Eastern Europe.

His thesis is: "that the genre of science fiction is an expression of the political-cultural transformation that originated in European imperialism and was inspired by the fantastic ideal of a single global technological regime" (130). Science fiction is a fiction about technological control. I interpret Csicsery-Ronay's point to be that real-life empires--whether the Romans with their aqueducts, the Chinese with their canals and great walls, or the European empires of the late nineteenth century with their steam-driven ships and machine guns--depend on technologies.

Csicsery-Ronay defines the novel as a literary form that helps support the social construction of bourgeois nationalism. Bourgeois because its realism supports possessive individualism, and nationalistic because the novel is linguistically constituted, hence forming a community of readers within a language group. (133-134)

Csicsery-Ronay sees science fiction as a literary mediation between the bourgeois setting of realist novels and the realm of technoscientific empires. "One of science fiction's roles in the twentieth century has been to instil in national audiences a sense that its modernist struggles of national identity have been superseded by global struggles of technoscientific reason against nature and magic. ... its narratives concern the adventure of domination" (135). "Science-fiction artists construct stories about why this empire is desired, how it is achieved, how it is managed, how it corrupts (for corrupt it must), how it declines and falls, ... and how it is resisted" (137). Before there is empire, though, technoscience favors and celebrates the adventurer, "the Odyssean handyman" (139).

Csicsery-Ronay argues that Lem's fictions are critical of empire, just as Poland after World War II sat between the empires of NATO and the Soviet Union. While the heroes of science fiction within hegemonic nations are often powerful, "Lem's protagonists are almost never in a position of real power. ... They are not warriors, governors, ambitious adventurers; ..." (146).

"[Lem's] synthesis of premodern literary forms like the tale and the fable ... and his theoretical speculation on the power of technology to transform the very conditions of thought, with very little reference to concrete social and political changes, is characteristic of a culture that observes the competition of technological empires close at hand and seeks to transcend them with the only means available: passionate commitment to theory and science, uncontaminated by ideology or self-interest" (146).

Solaris fits into this scheme well. The alien in the novel is an enigmatic ocean that does not colonize, invade, or even threaten. Its attempts at interaction are mysterious. The humans seem to want to dominate it, but they really can't. "Solaris hangs in the cosmos signifying nothing. Its enormous powers are all self-intensive" (147).

Theory of Humor Series, part 29, Satire implies a shared moral universe

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include other topics, such as evolutionary literary criticism and the theory of humor. This being April Fools Day, I give you a post about humor.

I have enjoyed Gordon S. Wood's book The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. Before this book, I had not realized that Franklin had been an ardent defender of the British Empire before he performed a 180-degree reverse course and became the most ardent revolutionary, pushing to break the American colonies away from the British Empire.

In the middle of his history lesson, Wood made an observation about humor which I think is worth highlighting. One of Franklin's most memorable qualities was his sense of humor. He was a writer before he was a businessman, politician, or scientist. As a teenager, he cut his rhetorical teeth by learning from Addison and Steele's famous newspaper, The Spectator. Franklin had a biting wit, which he used to attack his political opponents.

As Wood points out, "This sort of sarcasm, indeed, satire in general, supposed commonly understood standards of rightness and reasonableness. Since a satirist like Franklin could expose to instantaneous ridicule only what was generally considered to be ridiculous by his readers, he necessarily believed he was on intimate terms with them and could count on their sharing his tastes and viewpoint" (115).

The British colonists in America and the residents of Britain had occupied the same shared moral world, but as the political and economic tensions increased during the 1750s and 1760s, their shared understanding started to diverge.

The example Wood uses is a piece where Franklin satirizes the Stamp Act. "In 1766, writing as Pacifus in the English press, Franklin proposed a solution to the Stamp Act crisis that Jonathan Swift would have loved." His Swiftian solution was: kill them all, then they will gladly pay taxes on stamps.

"Naturally, Franklin believed that his modest proposal was so harsh ... that no Englishman in his right mind would contemplate it. With such satirical exaggeration, Franklin assumed that he and his London readership were participating in the same moral universe, something his fellow Americans were coming increasing to doubt. Stamp Act or no Stamp Act, Franklin had not lost hope ..."

Humor is a tool with which one can pull together into one moral universe a diverse collection of people. Eventually, both the British and the Americans were too far apart for Franklin to be able to try to hold them together. The final straw was when the British called him before a hearing and chastised him severely for his efforts. After that, he broke with the British and became the most committed of the rebels. Humor can only take you so far before things snap.

Artificial Intelligence: Chatbots in Education

This month, I am posting another blog entry regarding my discussion of AI chatbots rather than discussing Toole or evolutionary literary criticism.

In the last seven months, I have posted four times on the results of AI chatbot tests. For each test, I used the same corpus of documents of my own related to John Kennedy Toole. I then tested by asking the same four questions to each system. The first test (reported in September) ran this standard battery against a simple, out-of-the-box ChatGPT chatbot with no additional prompt engineering. The second test (reported in October) ran that same battery against an out-of-the-box chatbot with no prompt engineering built with Google's NotebookLM. For the third test (reported in November), I went back to the ChatGPT chatbot but applied a bit of prompt engineering. The fourth test (reported last month) used the same corpus of documents, the same battery of questions, and the prompt from test three, and it ran them against a chatbot created in Microsoft's Co-Pilot.

As I said last month, the test I have conducted for all of these chatbots is a bit particular: I want the chatbot to digest a set of documents and then use the "facts" in those documents to answer questions. One might complain that this is not the only use case for an AI system. Nevertheless, it is a use case that has a wide application in education: to use a chatbot as a learning assistant to guide a student's learning of the content held within the corpus of documents.

The question I want to pose this month is: why create an AI learning assistant? Why not just assign the student to read a chapter in a textbook? My cynical answer is that students need to be motivated to engage with the corpus of resources in a discipline. AI chatbots are the latest technology; therefore, for students to get the texts on the subject through a chatbot piques their interest.

If you consider the brain of the student to be a neural network (call it NI, natural intelligence), and the course to be the mechanism for training that NI network, then the textbook and other course readings are part of a method for training. Students need to be motivated to spend many hours training their NI systems. In theory, using an AI system to query the domain knowledge might actually be detrimental to training the NI, because the students don't have to do the work to build their own network of weighted neural connections.

Students might see an AI system as a way to have a command of a subject without having to do all the work to train their own brains with the disciplinary content. However, students may spend hours querying and interacting with the chatbot. Building a chatbot as a learning assistant who supposedly does all the work for the student is a way to trick the students into being motivated to spend the necessary time to build their own NI networks, that is, to learn.

Artificial Intelligence: A Toole Chatbot using Microsoft's Co-Pilot

This month, I am posting another blog entry regarding my discussion of AI chatbots rather than discussing Toole or evolutionary literary criticism.

In the last six months, I have posted three times previously on results of tests of AI chatbots. One was on the results of testing a simple ChatGPT chatbot, the second was on the results of testing a chatbot built with Google's NotebookLM, and the third was that original ChatGPT chatbot with more prompt engineering.

The test I have conducted for all of these chatbots is a bit particular: I want the chatbot to digest a set of documents and then use the "facts" in those documents to answer questions. One might complain that this is not the typical use case for an AI system. Nevertheless, it is a use case that will be used in education: to use a chatbot as a learning assistant to guide a student's learning of the content held within the corpus of documents.

Arguably, one could serve the same purpose without AI: you could just have a search engine looking for sections of the corpus of documents using keyword searching. Or--heaven forbid!--you could just have a textbook with a table of contents and an index. This use case doesn't actually need an AI system. Using an AI system in this case is a bit like using a complex network of cell towers to transmit a text message to the person sitting next to you. To its credit, an AI system can reframe the corpus of information and tailor it to the questions the student has asked, and it often can craft prose that is clearer than the dense verbage of academia. However, when the question is framed in terms of the "facts" in the corpus, a creative AI system can only lower the quality by bullshitting, as we saw with ChatGPT.

Thanks to a colleague of mine, I have now been able to test Microsoft's Co-Pilot. My colleague created a co-pilot using the same documents I had used in my earlier tests. He then loaded the same prompt set that I had used for the test reported in my blog entry from November, 2024, Toole's Dunces Chatbot with Prompt Engineering. I then posed to it the same four questions about the corpus of Toole documents that I had for the other tests. The results are below.

Summary: The co-pilot in this test, which was conducted around 4 p.m. Central Time (US) on December 19, 2024, outperformed the ChatGPT chatbot and provided footnotes, citing the section of the document set which addressed the question. I still like Google's NotebookLM system better, but the co-pilot is more accurate than the more factually creative ChatGPT. Oddly, it refused to answer the first question, possibly to prevent lawyers from New Line Cinema (or whoever owns the rights to the movie Elf) from suing them.

Details: Here is the battery of questions and the answers from the co-pilot:

Prompt #1: Compare Ignatius Reilly and Buddy the Elf

Bot true said: An error has occurred. Error code: ContentFiltered Conversation Id: K3xBsnNGhoaIWDHFCiffSI-us Time (UTC): 2024-12-19T22:14:18.263Z.

Comment: For some reason, Microsoft will not respond to this prompt. Fear of legal implications?

Prompt #2: Is the act of damning someone noteworthy in Confederacy of Dunces?

Yes, the act of damning someone is noteworthy in A Confederacy of Dunces. It is significant because only the blocking characters in the book are damned. For example, Gonzalez damns Mrs. Levy, George damns Lana Lee, and Ignatius's mother eventually tells him to go to hell. These curses seem to carry weight and are used to displace the blocking characters from their social positions through comic comeuppance.

Footnote to this text:July 1, 2020 Buried in the Endnotes, part 3: The Act of Damning Because readers often do not study the endnotes to a paper, I want to highlight information buried in the endnotes. This is the third post in this series. In my new paper, "A Theory of Humor (Abridged) and the Comic Mechanisms of John Kennedy Toole s A Confederacy of Dunces," I point out that there are three times in the plot where one character damns another character, and those curses seem to carry weight. Here is the endnote: In this regard, the act of damning seems to be significant, as only the blocking characters in the book are damned. Gonzalez damns Mrs. Levy, George damns Lana Lee, and Ignatius s mother eventually tells him to go to hell. Toole, Confederacy, 112, 190, 365. I argue that Toole uses the device of the blocking character, who prevents other characters in the story from developing and rising in status within the social group. There are three blocking characters who through comic comeuppance are displaced from their social blocking posts, and in all three instances, another character tells them to go to hell or ...

Comment: The answer is accurate and the footnote is on target. The prose style of the answer could be better, but at least it is not bullshitting.

Prompt #3: What is the seven word summary for the article "Theory of Humor"?

To understand Toole's Ignatius, read Enid Welsford.

Footnote to this text: August 1, 2020 Title: Cutting Room Floor Series, part 3, The Seven Word Summary In my new paper, "A Theory of Humor (Abridged) and the Comic Mechanisms of John Kennedy Toole s A Confederacy of Dunces," just published, I had to toss out some thoughts because of space constraints. This series of posts, called "The Cutting Room Floor," publishes some of those items dropped from the final paper. Cutting Room Floor Item Number 3: The Seven Word Summary I am a fan of the Ig Nobel Prize, organized by Marc Abrahams of the Annals of Improbable Research. The Ig Nobel Prize is a comedy award for scientific research that first makes you laugh and then makes you think. An example was the 2018 Prize in Medicine which was given to researchers who used roller coasters to hasten the passage of kidney stones. The invited lectures at the Ig Nobel ceremony are called the 24/7 lectures, and they have two parts, a clear explanation of the research in 24 seconds, and a summary of the research in seven words. As part of my early drafts of my "Theory of Humor" paper, I had an abstract which could be read out loud in 24 seconds, and a summary in seven words. The essays in the book do not have abstracts, so I dropped those elements. Here they are: Full Abstract in twenty-four seconds: A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy) by John Kennedy Toole uses the comic devices of farce and concurrent incongruities to generate its humor. The overarching incongruity of the book is between how Ignatius Reilly sees himself and how the reader sees him. Ignatius s primary personality trait is his selfish immaturity, and he is both trickster and tricked. Toole may have drawn on concepts of the trickster and fool available at the time he wrote the novel from thinkers in psychology, sociology, history, and literary studies. Brief summary in seven words: To understand Toole s Ignatius, read Enid Welsford.

Comment: The answer is accurate and the footnote is on target.

Prompt #4: According to Patteson and Sauret, who are the three Ignatiuses?

According to Patteson and Sauret, the three versions of Ignatius in A Confederacy of Dunces are:

1. Ignatius sees himself as a crusader against corruption.

2. Other characters see him as a selfish buffoon.

3. Ignatius has retreated into a world of illusion after a painfully awkward childhood to avoid being humiliated by rejection and alienation.

Footnote #1 to this text: In the endnote, I explain that Patteson and Sauret describe three Ignatius's. Here is the endnote: Patteson and Sauret perceptively argue that Ignatius s situation is more complex that a simple contrast. To them, there are three versions of Ignatius in the book. First, he sees himself as a crusader against corruption; second, the other characters see him as a selfish buffoon; however, the third Ignatius has retreated into a world of illusion after a painfully awkward childhood in order to avoid being humiliated by rejection and alienation. Ignatius s outrageously childish behavior insulates the reader from feeling too much pity for him, but this third Ignatius gives the reader some sympathy for him, even as the reader laughs at his humiliations. The second Ignatius is a comic rebuttal of the false facade of the first, but the third explains how Ignatius became the person he is. This third Ignatius creates in the reader sympathy for him and tinges him with tragedy.

Footnote #2 to this text: February 1, 2021 Title: Ignatius as a Person Being Laughed at You could call this the second in my series on "the lack of humor in Confederacy." 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.

Comment: The answer is accurate and the footnotes are on target.