Instead, he resembles the Wife of Bath from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in his ability to sift through texts and choose what he wants from them. Reilly does not read from a position of piety or humility.
If you ever wondered how people who received a great books education could become bad, here’s your example. In reality, Reilly has been malformed by his reading. Such a list of great books may lead us to believe that here we have a hero formed by the tradition. That’s fitting, since Reilly draws inordinately and incoherently on the texts that he’s read, creating himself in the mold of his fragmented literary inheritance, which includes Consolation of Philosophy, Don Quixote, Gargantua, Henry IV, Gulliver’s Travels, Joseph Andrews, Tristram Shandy, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Gone with the Wind. Reilly, without progenitor in any literature I know of-slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one-who is in violent revolt against the modern age.” Although he asserts that Reilly is “without progenitor,” the character reminds Percy of so many predecessors. Walker Percy, the novelist who made outsider heroes famous, introduces Reilly in a foreword to the novel: “Here at any rate is Ignatius J. He’s offensive, revolting, and cyclically destructive. Reilly thinks of himself as a modern philosopher, a theologian but without that distracting reverence for an Almighty Deity. Instead, they warn us against our penchant for misreading good books. Their stories are not meant to be exemplary. The two are notoriously bad readers of good literature who exercise their freedom to the detriment of other people’s.
In truth, Reilly is no more a hero than Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. Reilly, Bissell still views him as a “hero.” Although he lamented the vices of the book’s protagonist, Ignatius J. While Bissell was clever enough to celebrate the novel’s fortieth anniversary, he missed the point of the book. In January 2021, when Tom Bissell reconsidered the book in our time, he demonstrated that it is not merely what you read that matters but how you read. John Kennedy Toole’s novel is so funny that most people just enjoy the ride, not thinking too deeply about the experience of the story. It’s also a cautionary tale of a seriously bad reader. The 1980 Pulitzer Prize winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces is not just a litmus test for finding friends (if you don’t like this book, then we will never be bosom buddies).
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