Rating: 
Summary: There's Satire, and Then There's OUCH! This Book
Review: Take one very eccentric city--N'Awlins, the Big Easy. Take some very eccentric characters, everyone from a madame-slash-barkeeper to a beatnik down from New York to some very Confirmed Bachelors to the world's worst stripper. Surround them with the most eccentric of all--Ignatius Reilly, a man by his lights so pure he can't even hold a menial job at the public library because it would cause him to "slop glue all over their best-sellers." You have A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES.There are two levels of satire--the easy, Saturday Night Live type that pokes fun at easy figures like fatuous politicians and hypocritical ministers and then the scathing, down-deep kind that goes after everyone. This book goes after everyone, which is the source of its humor as well as its chief weakness. Jews, cops, lesbians, gay men,widows, bimbos, suburbanites, and so on and so on behave just like their worst stereotypes. If you think this is funny, read the book. If you think this is offensive, leave the book alone. If you stay for the book, you'll be treated to a rollicking, picaresque plot and encounter in Ignatius one of American literature's true originals. For what it is, A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES is first rate.
Rating:
Summary: I LOVE my collie
Review: It is the absurdity of a people and their habits and their views and their daily quests to be right that makes this book not just funny but rather touchingly and hauntingly funny. It is a funny that cannot be shaken. Even after you read this book, its characters will replay in yout head. Being from New Orleans, I know the city as a bunch of little cities which make up the greater metropolis, and each of the smaller parts is on a quest to present its part as the only right part. John Kennedy Toole has tapped in to our absurdity in grand style and made me laugh at the way humanity seeks balance by putting the rest of the world on opposite ends of a bizare scale. I wish that John Kennedy Toole were still here to look at our current views and routines and develop new characters to represent each of us; I wish he could still offer us each 12 inches of paradise just as he did in the Quarter while lazily pushing his rolling hot dog cart through the New Orleans humidity. Humans! You gotta' love us! Our ability to scrutinize ourselves and laugh at ourselves is at its finest in this great novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Hmmmmm...Didn't see too much humor
Review: It was a good book. I'll admit to that. However, I did not find it "rip-roaring". I found it disturbing. It did have funny moments, but I was disappointed, I guess I heard too much hype about its humor. J.K. Toole was a good writer. But I felt this book was unfinished. The last chapter, although climactic seemed to die at the very end. All in all a good, quick read. Interesting characters and story line. Some humor, mostly tragedy and unsetteling reality.
Rating:
Summary: AMERICAN DREAM
Review: I loved the book! After reading what everyone else commented on, no one really talked about how Ignatius Reilly was the true way we all should live our lives. We have forgotten the true vision of the American dream, we need to come back to our senses. The American dream isn't about materialistic wealth (look at Ignatius). But he had one thing many of us don't embrace, self-satisfaction. We are caught up in a world of fast cars, beautiful people, and lots of money. We need to remind ourselves that we need to be content with ourselves before anything else. In my opinion, Ignatius is beautiful in his own mysterious ways. JDK
Rating:
Summary: What a good book!
Review: This is an excelent piece of liturature. Ignatius' language and story line are incredible. Ignatius is funny and keeps you wanting to read more. I recomend this book with no reserve.
Rating:
Summary: Down and Out in Nawlins
Review: I've never laughed so hard in my life. If you ever wondered what life looks like throughthe eyes of a hotdog vendor,while living over the edge of reality, then you must read this book. It's an absolute delight to the imagination and funny bone.
Rating:
Summary: Astonishingly Witty!
Review: I romped through this novel in only a few days - laughing all the way! I'd never read anything so clever: so funny, yet wrought with the many sad and universal truths of this life. Ignatius J. Reilly - a pathetic and sad picture of a human being - being quite well-aware that he is possessed of a vast superiority of mind - gallivants through New Orleans leaving all forms of upheaval in his wake. Ah - Toole brings New Orleans, a city I love dearly, alive here - it swelters and breathes with every word on every page of this epic work of art and wit!
Rating: 
Summary: It didn't make me laugh...
Review: I actually liked the book. It's so life-like. I know far too many people that are just as awful and obnoxious as the charecters in it. Very vivid, very depressing. The only character I would really want to spend time with was the cloud of smoke that is Jones. The book was worth it just for Jones. My main problem with the book was that it failed to make me laugh. This wouldn't be a problem normally. I don't expect books to be laughfests as a rule, but everyone said "Oh, it's soo hilarious! I was cracking up the whole time I read it!" So I had to read it for a literature class. My teacher said it is a masterpeice. It won the Pulitzer Prize! So I was expecting to laugh this time. But I couldn't. It was just too depressing. I told my teacher I didn't think it was funny. He asked my classmates if they thought it was funny and they all said yes. My teacher quoted Jonathon Winters, who said that the scariest person in the world is someone without a sense of humor. So maybe I don't have a sense of humor, but I find it difficult to see the point of laughing at miserable people who make each other more miserable. There are also a lot of sex jokes and a lot of jokes about passing gas, but I can get that from Beavis and Butthead. My teacher also said the whole book was about scorn. It is supposed to make you feel beter about yourself because you're not as horrible as the people in the book, but I think my ego was okay without having read this book. But I liked Toole's style. The dialogues and descriptions are wonderful. The book is great as a description of the burgeoning chaos of the early sixties. It just didn't make me laugh.
Rating:
Summary: A Confederacy of Dunces
Review: This is quite simply the greatest book ever written. The basic premise seems almost ordinary, but in the hands of JK Toole, it becomes a magnificent one man circus, a triumph of crass stupidity over reason and normality.It is crammed with self- referential "in-jokes", which may pass you by on the first reading. The characters are believable, immaculatley brought to life by the authors incredible style- you can almost taste the New Orleans atmosphere, and its collection of Vagrants, losers, lunatics and heroes that are the books cast are observed with empathy and admiration. The central character is surely the creation of a genius, and the plotlines draw you in to their spiralling web, until they collide with uproarious humour in one of literatures truly Great moments. Few works deserve the title "Masterpiece"- this is surely one.
Rating:
Summary: A novel of surpassing wit and humanity
Review: I regret this novel ever finished. This is because the characters are so vividly and sympathetically drawn, the atmosphere of N'Orleans so effectively captured, and the cadence of speech so real, one is filled with an indefinable love of life itself through having experienced the world of Confederacy of Dunces. There's little plot and what there is I can't relate it. If there's a major theme it might be that even the lowest ragamuffin and connivingest wretch can be possessed of a surpassing wit and humanity that make them interesting and important in the scheme of things. Pride, greed, sloth, vanity, arrogance, venality, selfishness may possess the characters and yet an essential vulnerability and innocence and humanity make them redeemable. A lovely, lovely novel by a writer to be spoken of in the same breath as Twain, Dickens and Goncharov.
| 
