Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Confederacy of Dunces, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Medievalism, Modernity, and Fate
The Legacy of Slavery
Sexuality, Attraction, and Repulsion
Freedom
Appearance, Identity, and Disguise
Hypocrisy and Self-Interest
Summary
Analysis
Ignatius sits writing in his room. Through the wall, he can hear Irene preparing to go out. Before she leaves, Irene bangs on his door, but Ignatius tells his mother to go away. She begins to kick the door, and at last Ignatius opens it and finds his mother made up, with powder all over her dress. Ignatius berates Irene for spending all their money going out with her friends, but Irene defends herself and says that Ignatius’s wages are too low.
Ignatius does not want to take responsibility for the fine that Irene owes for the car crash because he does not believe he is responsible for what happens to him—rather, fate determines everything. This belief conveniently removes any guilt Ignatius may feel for not helping his mother and allows him to justify his selfish attitude toward her.
Themes
Ignatius begs Irene to leave him alone, but Irene insists that he kiss her goodbye. Ignatius does so and a car horn sounds outside. Irene rushes off and Ignatius hurries to his room, opens the window, and throws a bottle of ink at Santa Battaglia’s car as it drives off with his mother and Patrolman Mancuso inside.
Ignatius resents Santa because she has replaced him as the most influential person in Irene’s life. Ignatius previously had a controlling relationship with Irene and believed that he took charge of her life for her own good. However, Ignatius really controlled Irene to benefit himself.
Themes
Satisfied, Ignatius sits down to continue his “Diary of a Working Boy.” Ignatius writes that he has decorated the office and that Mr. Gonzalez is a dictator who makes Miss Trixie want to retire. Ignatius describes the conditions in the factory, where most of the workers are black, and says that it is like a modernized version of slavery, except that instead of picking cotton, black workers are sewing it. He then goes off on a tangent about pollution in the Mississippi River and his journey on the bus out to Baton Rouge. He would really prefer it if public buses were discontinued altogether.
Ignatius deliberately skews his narrative to suggest that Mr. Gonzalez is a tyrant and to justify his own desire to hold a riot at work. As he wishes to use the riot to make himself look socially progressive (in order to annoy his progressive ex-girlfriend, Myrna) Ignatius must imply that Mr. Gonzalez is like a slave owner and therefore needs to be overthrown. In reality, Mr. Gonzalez has little say over the factory conditions. Ignatius deliberately draws the connection between the manufacture of garments (for which the black workers are underpaid) and cotton fields (in which black people worked as slaves). His criticisms of racism and discrimination are in some ways relevant because the black workers are forced to work for low pay to comply with vagrancy laws. However, Ignatius’s aims are essentially selfish and dictatorial, rather than genuinely caring.
Themes
Back to his description of the factory, Ignatius writes that he entered a world of chaos when he walked onto the factory floor and that he was reminded of Heart of Darkness. He saw a young woman sewing an evening dress for herself instead of Levy’s pants, and looked for Mr. Palermo, the floor manager, who is always drunk. Ignatius thinks the workers must be paid very badly because there are so many bars in the area around the factory.
Ignatius again invokes Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, which describes a colonizer’s journey into the African Congo and his horror at the chaos and corruption which he witnesses under colonialism. Ignatius compares the factory, in which the black workers are underpaid but otherwise unmolested, to the horrors of colonialism. Ignatius is being dramatic, but there is, again, some validity to the idea that although the black workers are paid for their labor, they are not at the factory through choice. Instead, they face limited career options because of racism and the legacy of slavery in the South, which was a direct result of colonialism and the slave trade, both of which Conrad wrote about.
Themes
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Jazz music plays from the speakers in the factory, and Ignatius turns it off because he thinks the workers don’t like it. However, when he does, people shout out in protest, so Ignatius turns it back on and begins to dance for the worker’s entertainment. Midway through a step, he falls and is helped up by some of the workers. He chats with them for a while and learns that they are very badly paid.
This passage demonstrates that Ignatius does not understand the people he believes he can set free. He has a condescending attitude toward the black workers: he presumptuously turns their music off and then feels that he has won them over with a childish dance when they are presumably laughing at him, not with him. Ignatius is manipulative in his approach—although he pretends to want to help the workers, he is only interested in proving to his ex-girlfriend, Myrna, that he is progressive. He does not care how the workers may be negatively affected by a riot.
Themes
Ignatius feels a type of kinship with the black workers because, like them, he sees himself as an exile from American society. He is confused to learn that many of the workers admire American middle-class society and want to earn enough to join it, but he does not hold it against them. He writes that, if anyone tried to make him middle-class, he would protest violently and even damage property. Ignatius even feels that perhaps he should have been born black because he would have enjoyed terrorizing white old ladies who had to sit by him on the bus.
Ignatius redundantly compares his own feelings of lethargy and persecution in modern society to the experience of black people in the South. However, Ignatius’s suffering is most often the result of his own unwillingness to adapt, rather than the result of systemic prejudice. He cannot empathize with the black workers and fails to recognize his own privilege. Ignatius’s belief that it would be fun to terrorize white people on the bus is directly contradicted by Jones’s experience of a white woman who was afraid of him on the bus. In reality, the experience is uncomfortable and upsetting for Jones because he does not want to be viewed as a threat and faces significant personal risk if he is perceived this way by white society.
Themes
Ignatius also feels that if he and Irene were black, Irene would be too exhausted from years of work to force him into a job or to go bowling. Ignatius would feel secure knowing that nothing he could do would change his fate. He thinks it would be an insult to black people if they became middle-class, as it would spoil their noble heritage. It is lucky, therefore, that he is writing his testament because it will provide a sharp, unbiased picture of contemporary American life and all its problems.
Ignatius draws a parallel between black slaves and people under medieval feudal systems, and thinks that both states are preferable to modern capitalism. In modern American society, there is an emphasis on personal responsibility—people have individual rights but are partly responsible for their level of income through the job that they choose. Ignatius dislikes this because he does not wish to take responsibility for his life in any way and feels that it would be better to be enslaved. This mindset only emphasizes the fact that Ignatius has never been persecuted in a meaningful way and has no idea how horrible it would be. He simplifies and romanticizes the experience of black Americans because he imagines that it is nice to have all choice removed from life—a slave could not choose how to work but could only comply with the master’s rules. However, he does not acknowledge that he is lucky to have many choices and freedoms compared to a black person, even in the 1960s, when slavery had long been abolished.
Themes
Ignatius talks for a long time with the factory workers about their wages and conditions. He is amazed that they do not protest and thinks that if he were in their position, he would have “stormed” the office by now. Ignatius then goes on to describe his first meeting with his ex-girlfriend, Myrna Minkoff, while at university. They met in a coffee shop and had a long argument about politics. Myrna considered herself very progressive and found Ignatius backward and conservative.
Ignatius displays ignorance about why black workers cannot simply change their circumstances and hypocritically imagines that he would do a better job himself, although he does not believe he can change his current circumstances despite being a white man with a great deal of social privilege. Although black people were granted civil rights in the 1960s, the legacy of slavery in America meant that black people were still subject to systemic prejudice. Ignatius believes in a return to a medieval worldview, so his perspective is not only conservative but hundreds of years out of date.
Themes
Ignatius notes that Myrna is from a wealthy New York family and had come to a Southern university to gain experience of life beyond the city. Ignatius found Myrna annoying and felt that she went out looking to be persecuted. Their regular sparring led them to become a sort of platonic couple who confused and infuriated the people around them.
Myrna believed that the answer to all social and personal problems was sex and constantly tried to liberate people from their beliefs about virginity and sexual conventions. She befriended two southern girls and tried to sexually liberate them. In the end, one tried to commit suicide and the other had a nervous breakdown. Myrna, meanwhile, was almost raped by a janitor after she tried to preach sexual liberation to him.
Although Myrna believes that her progressive approach to life will help liberate people, this is clearly not always the case. It is implied that Myrna manipulated the Southern girls into having sex with her because the girls were deeply conservative and presumably averse to sex before marriage. Although Myrna feels that she has helped the girls by freeing them from beliefs she finds oppressive, her actions only harmed them. As they girls both end up mentally devastated by the experience, this suggests that Myrna thinks more about herself, and imposing her own worldview on others, than she thinks about the effects of forcing others to change themselves.
Themes
Myrna did not finish college and thought she could learn more out in the world than at school. Ignatius still sees her sometimes because she comes to the South on cultural expeditions. The last time he saw her, she had come to teach folk songs and chain gang music to black people but found that they were more interested in modern music. The white communities turned against her, however, and chased her out of town—something of which she was very proud.
Myrna rejects academia because she does not like to have her perspective challenged, even though she considers herself progressive. Myrna, in fact, proves herself as blind to the experience of others as Ignatius is, especially when it comes to the social position of black people in the South. She does not view black people as individuals who can adapt to and become equal citizens in modern American society, but rather as a product of their cultural history that she can use to make herself look charitable and progressive.
Themes
Ignatius and Myrna write to each other quite often and Myrna always tries to persuade Ignatius to come to New York and join her in her many social causes. However, Ignatius thinks it is inevitable that one day Myrna will be arrested, and this will give her life a purpose it has hitherto lacked. Ignatius found Myrna’s last letter especially offensive and so has decided to take social action to show Myrna that he is not reactionary. He will organize a protest at work and take on the “fiend” Gonzalez, who keeps the workers down. On this triumphant note, Ignatius signs off.
It is striking that Ignatius equates Myrna’s inevitable incarceration with her spiritual liberation. It reflects Ignatius’s worldview—that the material world is meaningless (though of course Ignatius enjoys many material pleasures). This is based on medieval philosophy and Boethius’s idea that the world is a prison and that one can only be free in one’s mind. However, it also suggests that Myrna likes to think of herself as persecuted, like Ignatius, because she thinks that she is too wise for modern society and will be locked up because of this. Although Myrna professes to hate persecution, Ignatius suspects that the opposite is true—she craves it, and goes out of her way to be provocative.
Themes
