[3] The book's title refers to an epigram from Jonathan Swift's essay Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting: "When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

A Confederacy of Dunces follows the misadventures of protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly, a lazy, overweight, misanthropic, self-styled scholar who lives at home with his mother.

He is an educated but slothful 30-year-old man living in the Uptown neighborhood of early-1960s New Orleans who, in his quest for employment, has various adventures with colorful French Quarter characters.

While at Tulane, Toole filled in for a friend at a job as a hot tamale cart vendor, and worked at a family owned and operated clothing factory.

Ignatius J. Reilly is an overweight and unemployed thirty-year-old with a master's degree in Medieval History who lives with his mother in New Orleans.

Affronted and outraged by Mancuso's unwarranted zeal and officious manner, Ignatius protests his innocence to the crowd while denouncing the city's vices and the graft of the local police.

An elderly man, Claude Robichaux, takes Ignatius' side, denouncing Officer Mancuso and the police as communists.

In the resulting uproar, Ignatius and his mother escape, taking refuge in the Night of Joy, a bar and strip club, in case Officer Mancuso is still in pursuit.

At the police station Robichaux meets Burma Jones, a young black man who also was wrongly arrested, he claims, but seems resigned to his fate.

The Sergeant tells Mancuso off for arresting Robichaux and punishes him for his uselessness by making him start to wear a different costume every day on the beat, beginning with a ballerina outfit.

Ignatius gets the idea that universal peace could be brought about by inciting gay men to encourage all the homosexuals in the armed forces to declare themselves, and substitute love making for warfare.

To this end he attends a wild gay party in the Latin Quarter looking for recruits to his cause, but when he begins to harangue the guests he is thrown out.

When Darlene takes to the stage her cockatoo spies the gold pirate earring dangling from Ignatius’s ear and flies at it, causing chaos.

[2] In his foreword to the book, Walker Percy describes Ignatius as a "slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one".

The disdain becomes his obsession: he goes to movies in order to mock their perversity and express his outrage with the contemporary world's lack of "theology and geometry".

The workings of his pyloric valve play an important role in his life, reacting strongly to incidents in a fashion that he likens to Cassandra in terms of prophetic significance.

Toole provides comical descriptions of two of the films Ignatius watches without naming them; they can be recognized as Billy Rose's Jumbo and That Touch of Mink, both Doris Day features released in 1962.

In another passage, Irene Reilly recalls the night Ignatius was conceived: after she and her husband viewed Red Dust, released in October 1932.

[10] A bronze statue of Ignatius J. Reilly is located under the clock on the down-river side of the 800 block of Canal Street, New Orleans, the former site of the D. H. Holmes Department Store, now the Hyatt French Quarter Hotel.

The statue mimics the opening scene: Ignatius waits for his mother under the D.H. Holmes clock, clutching a Werlein's shopping bag, dressed in a hunting cap, flannel shirt, baggy pants and scarf, 'studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste.'

In Confederacy, such narrative interludes vary more widely in form and include light verse, journal entries by Ignatius, and also letters between himself and Myrna.

Thelma repeatedly called Walker Percy, an author and college instructor at Loyola University New Orleans, to demand for him to read it.

He initially resisted; however, as he recounts in the book's foreword: ...the lady was persistent, and it somehow came to pass that she stood in my office handing me the hefty manuscript.

While Tulane University in New Orleans retains a collection of Toole's papers, and some early drafts have been found, the location of the original manuscript is unknown.

[21] A version adapted by Steven Soderbergh and Scott Kramer, and slated to be directed by David Gordon Green, was scheduled for release in 2005.

A staged reading of the script took place at the 8th Nantucket Film Festival, with Ferrell as Ignatius, Anne Meara as Irene, Paul Rudd as Officer Mancuso, Kristen Johnston as Lana Lee, Mos Def as Burma Jones, Rosie Perez as Darlene, Olympia Dukakis as Santa Battaglia and Miss Trixie, Natasha Lyonne as Myrna, Alan Cumming as Dorian Greene, John Shea as Gonzales, Jesse Eisenberg as George, John Conlon as Claude Robichaux, Jace Alexander as Bartender Ben, Celia Weston as Miss Annie, Miss Inez & Mrs. Levy, and Dan Hedaya as Mr.

They include disorganization and lack of interest at Paramount Pictures, Helen Hill the head of the Louisiana State Film Commission being murdered, and the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans.