106 pages • 3 hours read
John Kennedy TooleA Confederacy of Dunces
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1980A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
Ignatius shuffles home after failing to get a job at an insurance company. Mrs. Reilly tells him to “look up,” a phrase she has taken from Mancuso (54). Ignatius is enraged and complains about trying to find work. He insists that he cannot wake up too early and that perhaps “a newspaper route would be rather agreeable” (56). Ignatius envisions being driven along the route by his mother in her Plymouth. Mrs. Reilly demands that he visit Levy Pants to inquire about a job advertised in the newspaper.
Mancuso is investigating the Night of Joy after Ignatius complained about how the owner treated him and his mother. He wants to impress his sergeant by bringing in a “suspicious character” (58). He dresses as a soldier, the latest in his string of unfortunate costumes. The sergeant hears reports of a strangely dressed man molesting people on a bus and assumes it was Mancuso.
Mr. Gonzalez has worked for Levy Pants for 20 years and is always the first to arrive at work. Mr. Levy is a somewhat absent though undemanding owner; most of the other staff are interchangeable. Miss Trixie, the “octogenarian assistant accountant,” has a desk next to Mr. Gonzalez (59). While his is immaculate, hers is a mess. The company is in dire need of office help.
Ignatius bursts into the office, his hair and moustache slicked back with Vaseline. He is impressed with the untidy, confused office. As Mr. Gonzalez interviews Ignatius, Miss Trixie falls asleep. This pleases Ignatius. The salary is $60 a week, which Ignatius says is too little, as he has many competing offers. When Mr. Gonzales includes $0.20-a-day carfare, Ignatius accepts.
Jones refuses to remove his sunglasses when Lana asks. As he sweeps, he complains about his low wage and threatens to go to the police and reveal that “the Night of Joy a glorify cathouse” (64). A young man named George enters and talks with Lana about a deal involving packages and orphans. Jones sweeps while Lana counts her money.
Ignatius rides in a taxi, heading home. He begins to write, describing the working conditions at Levy Pants. He considers Mr. Gonzalez a “cretin” and Miss Trixie a “Medusa of capitalism” (67). Ignatius has “many plans” for his filing department and plans to have Mr. Gonzalez fire any other workers to avoid distractions (68). As he arrives home, Ignatius sees his mother approaching. Ignatius’s lute playing, she tells him, has driven their neighbor to a “little fainting spell” (69). When Ignatius tells her of his new job, she weeps with pride. She soon heads out to bowl with Mancuso and his aunt. This infuriates Ignatius. He reads a letter from Myrna, his ex-girlfriend. Myrna does not believe the car accident story and encourages Ignatius to “commit [himself] to the crucial problems of the times” (72). She believes that Ignatius needs the “therapy of sex” and offers him the role of a demagogic Irish landlord in a film she is making about interracial marriage (72). Ignatius throws the letter into a fire and resolves to “show this offensive trollop” (73).
Chapter 4 Summary
Ignatius has “neglected the morning filing” to make himself a sign, awarding himself the title of custodian of the Department of Research and Reference at Levy Pants (74). While trying a small wheeled stool, he falls on the floor and claims to have broken his back. Mr. Gonzalez does not think he is “badly injured” (76). Miss Trixie tries to help him up but only injures him further. At that moment, Mr. Levy arrives. Ignatius scrambles to his feet, eager to impress his ideas on the company’s owner.
After directing Mr. Gonzales to pen a few letters in his name, Mr. Levy slips out as quickly as he can. Upon reviewing the letters, Ignatius finds them lacking. When Mr. Gonzalez visits the factory to speak to the foreman, Ignatius begins to type, outlining his plans to make Levy Pants “more militant and more authoritarian” (79). He also writes an inflammatory letter to one of the company’s distributors, Abelman’s Dry Goods, threatening the “sting of the lash across your pitiful shoulders” (80). He then deposits the day’s filing into the wastebasket.
As Jones sweeps the floor, Lana wonders whether he has been feeding information to the police. Plainclothes policemen have been visiting the bar, and she wants to know why.
Mrs. Reilly sits in her kitchen, drinking wine and reflecting on the house when Ignatius is at work. It smells different. The phone rings; Santa Battaglia (Mancuso’s aunt) has called to talk to Mrs. Reilly. They discuss their bowling trip, and Santa mentions that Mancuso was temporarily arrested, as was a man who asked after Mrs. Reilly at the fish market. Santa believes that her friend has been “stuck away with that son of yours too long” (83). They agree to go bowling later that night.
Inside their “sensually comfortable” home, Mr. and Mrs. Levy watch television (84). Mrs. Levy believes the set is broken; Mr. Levy thinks otherwise. He complains about his trip to the company earlier in the day, a chore that “always makes [him] depressed” (85). He blames his tyrannical father for destroying the business and all of his interest in it. “Now is the time to sell,” he says of the company (86).
Ignatius is home alone. Reviewing his old writings, he brings to mind a “new, extremely commercial project” (87) and sets to work on a piece titled “THE JOURNEY OF A WORKING BOY, OR, UP FROM SLOTH” (88). In it, he relates his recent experiences in the working world and the innovations he has implemented. These include arriving late and throwing the filing in the wastebasket. He believes Levy to be a giant of commerce, Trixie to be incredibly wise, and the factory foreman to be a drunk and a “chronic tosspot” (89). He contemplates replying to Myrna but instead plays a little on his lute. As he gets into a shouting contest with a neighbor, his mother arrives home. As she enters the house, he slips out and lets the air out of Mancuso’s tire. Then he watches his mother, Mancuso, and Santa through the window. Santa dances, making so much noise that the neighbor threatens to call the police. Mancuso pleads for them to stop.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Even though Ignatius has demonstrated very few talents that an employer might wish to hire, he manages to secure a job at Levy Pants. As such, the reader is given a glimpse into how Ignatius operates in a working environment. While this does not reveal more about Ignatius than is already known—his is lazy, easily distracted, pompous, and full of excuses—it does provide a commentary on the state of employment. Levy Pants is a failing corporation. Owned by the absent Mr. Levy and operated by the lackluster Mr. Gonzales, it is a place keen to employ Ignatius and already employs Trixie. Other workers come and go on regularly, and the entire institution is seemingly failing on every level.
As Ignatius’s first real experience of the commercial world, Levy Pants acts as a metaphor for the state of big business in 1960s America. There is a severe disconnect between the factory workers and management. The owner is disconnected from the business and exists only to reap the profits and fund his extravagant lifestyle. Those who work in the bureaucracy are abject failures and frauds, either trying to do well despite their shortcomings or so dedicated to a long-promised retirement that they have mentally checked out. The business is in no way efficient or sensible. Despite this, Ignatius still finds several ways to make it worse.
However, Ignatius is not uninterested in the business. For the first time, the reader sees how Ignatius operates when he is truly inspired. He has been working on other projects for some time: his writing, his musicianship, and his ongoing arguments with Myrna have all ended in some degree of failure or remain perpetually unfinished. However, once he enters the workforce, he feels inspired to make Levy Pants a better place. But his diagnosis of the company is entirely wrong. He believes Mr. Gonzalez to be a lazy, incompetent man and Trixie to be the secret brains behind the organization. He is hired to do the office filing but sets his sights higher. His way of achieving these lofty goals is to plant beans and craft a series of ornate signs for the office. Not only is this a damning indictment of Ignatius’s business acumen, but the fact that he is praised for his work and not immediately fired is an even more damning indictment of Levy Pants. Gonzalez does not realize that the filing is simply being thrown away, Trixie cannot even get Ignatius’s name right, and Mr. Levy is too distracted to even care. Ignatius and his flawed comprehension of the commercial world is indulged by the very operation he seems set to destroy. American capitalism, in a metaphorical sense, is being broken apart from the inside by the slow reveal of the absurd mechanics that operate beneath its hood. When Ignatius writes the letter to Abelman, he is sowing the seeds of the entire company’s potential downfall. His continued existence in the commercial world is a searing indictment of the commercial world itself.
