YMMV / A Confederacy of Dunces

• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • Darlene's stripped-by-a-bird act was not invented for this book. A burlesque performer named Yvette Dare famously used a trained parrot to accomplish this in real life.
  • Dr. Nut is not a Bland-Name Product of Dr. Pepper but an actual discontinued soda that was popular in New Orleans at the time, with a completely different flavor similar to amaretto.
• Fair for Its Day: Dorian and Burma can come across as somewhat bigoted caricatures to modern readers. But Burma is sympathetically portrayed as a victim of Police Brutality and Dorian is never portrayed as a villain. Helped by the fact that everyone in the story is caricatured and exaggerated to some extent, so their portrayals don't necessarily stand out over anyone else's.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Hroswitha, whom Ignatius name-checks a couple of times, was an actual person — a medieval nun and playwright whose works are mostly about chaste, pious women frustrating the schemes of lascivious men.
  • Ignatius is named after Ignatius of Loyola, one of the founders of the Jesuits and one of the principal figures of the Counter-Reformation. Fitting for a man so reactionary, he believes the world ought to return to pre-Renaissance feudalism.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Despite being written in the 1960s, Reilly is a dead ringer for a follower of the 21st century Dark Enlightenment / Neoreactionary movement. Fittingly, the Rational Wiki article for the movement contains several quotes from the book!
  • Ignatius is the original neckbeard way before the term was coined.
• Hype Backlash: This is a very polarizing book. If you check out its listing on Goodreads, you'll see nearly as many negative reviews as positive. Common complaints include the meandering plot, the unlikeable characters, and Ignatius's Karma Houdini ending. As one reviewer puts it, "This is the book that almost broke my book club."
• Iron Woobie:
  • Mancuso. No matter what is thrown at him, he doesn't back down. Fortunately, it works out for him in the end.
  • Burma. The dude is harassed by police and made to work for a greedy, abusive boss. Yet he deals with these problems with surprising equanimity, and, through Ignatius, he is able to deal with both of these problems at once.
  • Gus Levy. The guy had to deal with a nagging wife who puts him down constantly, and his father was a stubborn idiot who refused any of his recommendations. Subtly, he is so idle because he simply doesn't care anymore. Ignatius's letter, however, helps him regain interest in his company again.
• Jerkass Woobie: Reilly is perhaps the prime example of a non-functional human being in modern society, but he doesn't deserve all of the bad stuff that happens to him. Indeed, the more naïve reader might at first mistake him for just another "sensitive" young Sixties activist - one who's a bit strident but definitely well-intentioned. However, this characterization is undercut by the fact that Ignatius is only getting involved in social causes to stick it to his holier-than-thou girlfriend.
• One True Pairing: Myrna and Ignatius are pretty much destined to get together from the get-go.
• Squick:
  • Anyone who stands still long enough will get a lecture on Ignatius's valve. When it closes, he tends to fart and belch a lot.
  • On the subject of releases, Ignatius masturbates constantly for a puritanical figure, and what little is described is very unpleasant; he mentions having experimented with tools — rubber gloves, silk, Noxema — when he was a teenager but now just does it rotely out of boredom. His preferred ritual leading up to climax is not thinking of a woman or a man but remembering himself playing with his beloved dead Collie Rex, an act that is either outright bestial or very depressing (as he's trying to revisit the last time he was truly happy).
    • When Ignatius produces the homemade banner to be used for the "Crusade for Moorish Dignity" protest, it's revealed that he used his own white bedsheet, and that there are unwashed — or worse, indelible — yellow piss and semen stains on it. The would-be protesters are repulsed.
      "I wonder who been sleepin on that old thing," the intense woman with the spiritual bent, who was to be the leader of the choir, said. "Lord!"
      Several other prospective rioters expressed the same curiosity in more explicitly physical terminology.
      "Quiet now," Ignatius said, stomping one foot thunderously on the table. "Please! Two of the more statuesque women here will carry this banner between them as we march into the office."
      "I ain puttin my hand on that," one woman answered.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: This is a very common issue for people to take with the book; if you don't like reading comedy about a world populated by terrible people with no clear person to root for and don't like it when awful characters get off scot-free with their crimes, you should probably give it a pass.
• Values Dissonance: As this was written at the height of the Cold War, there is obviously a little bit of this.
  • In the end, Lana Lee is arrested for distributing pornography to minors, which is treated as her just desserts. She deserved punishment, but not just for that.
  • Toole paints his characters in very Broad Strokes, mining New Orleans stereotypes to their fullest in a way that would be considered insensitive today. Burma is a pot-smoking, sunglasses-wearing, Jive Turkey-spouting black man. Dorian Greene and his retinue of Camp Gay men and Butch Lesbian women are also examples. However, Toole is going for Rule of Funny rather than putting anyone down, and Burma and Dorian are hardly the only exaggerated caricatures in the book.
• Values Resonance:
  • In the beginning, Ignatius goes into a rant on how corrupt New Orleans has become, listing off all the vices and crimes going on there. Among things like drug addicts, prostitutes, and gamblers, he lists "sodomites" and lesbians. Of course, arch-conservative that he is (or thinks he is), he would probably say the same thing today. Part of this is because Ignatius is supposed to be an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist who thinks civilization took a wrong turn at the Renaissance, so having his views become slightly more out of date doesn't really change his characterization at all.
  • Burma Jones's experiences with racism as a black man in 1960s Louisiana are pretty relevant in the present. Not just the blatant discrimination he suffers from the police and in the workplace but the casual racism he faces from the more sympathetic white characters. Ignatius's sham rally of Levy Pants's black workforce shows how social justice movements can be ineffective and/or manipulated for selfish reasons.

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