[Persuaded by John Kennedy Toole's mother to read the manuscript of A Confederacy of Dunces, Walker Percy comments in his foreword to the novel:] I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good. I shall resist the temptation to say what first made me gape, grin, laugh out loud, shake my head in wonderment. Better let the reader ma...

There are readers—and I am one—who keep calm in the face of the stormiest comic novels. Wit, farce, satire, nonsense: I may be vastly tickled, but I do not laugh out loud. Till now. To the charms of … "A Confederacy of Dunces" I succumbed, stunned and seduced, page after page, vocal with delight. It gave me such pleasure that I would be ungrateful not to report here at the outset that, for all its flaws, it is a masterwork of comedy. (p. 7) A dozen characters bounce off ea...

[A Confederacy of Dunces] is a corker. It is a gross farce, a blustering satire, an epic comedy, a rumbling, roaring avalanche of a book that begins with a solitary fat man but quickly picks up cops and B-girls, clerks and capitalists, most of the "deviates" and "degenerates" of the French Quarter of New Orleans, and keeps right on gathering momentum until it sweeps away everything, including that most innocent of bystanders, the reader, in its path…. [Ignatius] is writing...

Noting that [A Confederacy of Dunces] was resurrected long after the author's death and published by a university press, the reader may well approach it with a certain wariness. It does not look promising…. Fortunately, this is not the case; the book needs no concessions. It is consistently entertaining and irresistibly funny, a comic epic in the great tradition of Cervantes and Fielding with a suspenseful and elaborate plot skillfully managed and the little world of New Orleans encompassing t...

[The protagonist of "A Confederacy of Dunces"] is the quin-tessential pessimist who is continually offended by a world ill-equipped to recognize his genius…. [Ignatius Reilly] is one of the most repelling, entertaining, and, in some strange way, sympathetic characters I have ever encountered…. The setting in New Orleans, where Toole renders as surrealistic a social landscape as one would ever hope to find, peopled by characters whose dialects only gain in comic effect by clashing...

All but the most dedicated admirers of comic fantasy will be made wary by their first impressions of A Confederacy of Dunces. Its paranoid title, adapted from Swift, promises the kind of literary self-consciousness that can so often become tedious. It carries an off-putting foreword explaining the author's suicide and the discovery of the manuscript by an American college tutor. The central character is a grotesque version of the unemployable, self-indulgent, middle-aged adolescent with a master�...