"A masterwork of comedy," "a high comedy," or "an epic comedy" is what the reviews on the cover explained. I don�t quite understand what the persons reviewing the book A Confederacy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, were finding so funny in it. I also don�t understand the things that made them proclaim that the work "was loved by every reviewer and everyone is right." My first impression of the book was just the opposite, but it did improve as I read farther.I do agree that the novel is a "masterwork," "radiant with intelligence" and "a serious important work" well deserving of The Pulitzer Prize, but for other reasons.

The author, even though he was young when he wrote this book, was brilliant in his observations of human nature and the different quirky characteristics a personality could possess. All the characters around Ignatius J. Reilly, the main character of the book, were portrayed as dunces, an alliance of morons and dimwits. Ignatius thought "I am apparently trapped in a limbo of lost souls." (Page 238) All of Toole�s characters seem to be misfits of one sort or another. All had problems in their lives, problems from within their own personality or forced upon them by society or their station in life. This is where I found my biggest problems with this book. Where some reviewers who found the various characters� antics funny, I found most of them to be very real life, and very sad but also thought provoking.

All the while Ignatius thought of himself as the opposite of a dunce: a genius, a scholar, a wise man. In which he thought "my god like mind" (page 280). This kind of thought lead him to think of himself as having no peers, no equals. His statement in the book: "for I mingle with my peers or no one�and since I have no peers, I mingle with no one," (page 134) I feel confirms this. I have an idea that Ignatius was meant to be all too much like a few hippies, beatniks, dropouts or (I hate to use the word for the lack of another) intellectual types from the idealistic, utopian 1960�s. This is when some young people were very anti-establishment, anti-government, anti-anything. There were some who honestly thought that there were conspiracies all around them and sometimes conspiracies did exist. This is what I feel Ignatius thought also, that all around him, there were people conspiring to get him or at least there were some that did not understand him and his high level of thought.

I enjoyed the level of detail throughout the book and the variety of words used to describe those details. I found the way Mr. Toole structured the book interesting. At times while he was building the plot, I thought it was taking too long. Yet at the end he used a bulleted like effect, with a sometimes quick wrap up of the different characters and their lives in which to sum things up.

I wonder how many of his characters from his book came from Mr. Toole�s own life? He must have been the ultimate people watcher!