John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces shows through its dysfunctional society two major American Themes: everyone is ignorant and brainless and the American work ethic is at a minimum. The main way that he shows that everyone is dim is through his main character, Ignatius. His actions and thoughts exemplify those of your typical ignorant American. Toole’s clever invention of Levy Pants, and more specifically its factory, shows the utter lack of concern that the American worker has with his job.
The first theme shown in the novel is simply that everyone on the face of the earth is dumb. No matter what. Ignatius Reilly is not uneducated; as a matter of fact he has a master’s degree. As opposed to having an obsessions to pop culture and a hate of historical context and knowledge, as all extraordinarily immature men who live with their mothers do, he obsesses over his hatred of pop culture (he specifically goes to movies to explore his distain of pop culture) and prefers the philosophy of the middle ages and a scholastic knowledge of everything from that time. Nevertheless, Ignatius is by far the most ignorant oaf that this novel has to offer. He feels himself superior to all saying that he “I only socialize with my equals, and since I have no equals I do not socialize.”
He is completely unaware of what is going on around him; he blurts out every comment that comes to his head without a filter. But he is not the only one: when Mrs. Reilly had a few of her new friends over, one of them – Santa is her name – started doing some outrageously kinky dance to some outrageously loud music, all outrageous enough to incite anger in a neighbor, Mrs. Reilly said, “Lord! What if Ignatius comes home and sees this,” to which she replied (to the mother of Ignatius, naturally), “fuck Ignatius.” This blatantly shows how people have no resolve for how others feel about what they say. The novel is plagued with minor characters who shoe how idiotic people really are. The police chief makes an impotent officer dress up in costumes every day until he starts acting like a real officer and brings people in as if the costumes could really help with the issue. Jones (a minor character who works in a bar for significantly less that minimum wage because the bar owner tricked him to thinking that he can be arrested for vagrancy if he does not have a job) gets himself into the parenthetically mentioned situation just because of his sheer ignorance. The moral of the story is this: everybody is dumb.
(On a completely unrelated note, Mrs. Reilly gasped in shock to Santa’s comment about Ignatius, but had a slight look of pleasure. If the reader has looked at the Mother and Son entry, this will bring him or her some additional information)
The second feature of American society that this novel exploits – or “theme” as you may call it – is the surprisingly low competency and ethic of its workers. If American labor was in the state that is presented in this novel, we may very well still all be farmers in Babylonia. The greatest example of this “ethic” in the novel is in Ignatius’s “journal” entry where he describes his visit to the factory of Levy Pants. He writes, “I saw only one pair of trousers actually completed in the time that I spent there, although the factory workers were shambling about clutching all sorts of scraps of cloth. One woman, I noticed, was pressing some baby’s clothing and another seemed to be making remarkable progress with the sections of fuscia satin which she was joining together with one of the large sewing machines.” She was making a gown. These workers represent the American working class’s low level of work ethic.
If we look up the chain, to the foreman of the factory, perhaps, we see that he is “normally only a few steps to the bottle.” During Ignatius’s visit, he was not even there; he was “probably quaffing a liquid lunch in one of the many taverns in the vicinity of our organization.” If we find it in ourselves to take a trip even farther up the symbolic chain, we can see the owner of Levy Pants, Mr. Levy, who admittedly does not want anything to do with the business and hardly ever goes by to see how things are running. He does not micro- or macro-manage. Through the Levy Pants organization Toole expresses the idea that the American worker does not care about his or her work.
Toole shapes every word and sentence and situation in the novel to show these two themes. The idea of dimwitted America is shown through Ignatius while the theme pertaining to the low work ethic is shown through Levy Pants… and of course, also Ignatius. (At Levy Pants he literally throws away his work to do what in his mind are more important projects.)
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