A Confederacy of Dunces

“Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person’s lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one’s soul.”

The opening pages introduce the novel’s fictionalized New Orleans and—more importantly—the bizarre, intellectual, gaseous, pompous protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly. In this opening paragraph, Ignatius—dressed in his ever-present, uniquely strange outfit—runs his eyes across the department store crowd and finds them wanting. Their new clothes offend him; the well-tailored and unrumpled garments juxtapose aggressively with his own. But most importantly, Ignatius turns these aesthetic complaints into ideological grievances. The clothes do not just signify an offensive taste in the wearer, but a “lack of theology or geometry” that impairs a person’s soul (6). The extreme and pompous nature of this logic—ascribing high-minded morality to seemingly inconsequential annoyances—is a hallmark of Ignatius’s character.

“Mrs. Reilly looked at her son’s reddening face and realized that he would very happily collapse at her feet just to prove his point. He had done it before.”

Once Ignatius is introduced, so is his mother. The two are (at this stage in the novel) inseparable, both in a physical sense and a narrative sense. Ignatius and his mother live together, their lives tangled in a complicated knot. The novel details the slow unraveling of this knot, culminating in Mrs. Reilly calling the psychiatrists to take Ignatius away. But in the early stages of the book, she is the only character who understands (as much as understanding is possible) her son.