Satire In John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy Of Dunces

As observers and active participants in society, authors experience and are subject to the follies, vices, and even the sins that are attributes of daily life. By using literary techniques, an author can address and possibly make fun of these uncomfortable and often serious situations with a casual demeanor: this is known as satire. Author John Kennedy Toole's partially autobiographical, Pulitzer prize winning novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, is a literary masterpiece that embodies an extreme satirical spirit and one that is fully committed to ridiculing the culture of the 1960s United States. The novel is truly remarkable in the sense that Toole created such a smooth and colloquial read that is enjoyable on a basic, comical level, yet one

Written during approximately the same time period as James Baldwin's, The Fire Next Time, this novel also exposes the harsh and discriminatory conditions that black Americans faced on a daily basis. Burma Jones is a black man living in New Orleans, which makes him a prime target for police harassment. In the second scene of the novel, Jones tells an innocent old man named Claude Robichaux, who has also been arrested for simply calling a police officer a "communiss," that "the nex thing, a flo'walk grabbin me, and then a po-lice mother draggin me off. A man ain got a chance"(26). Jones was mistakenly arrested under the suspicion that he stole nuts. Under strict pressure from their supervisors, overzealous police officers are tasked with arresting suspicious characters to meet a quota; this makes black citizens an easy target for vagrancy. Jones is subsequently forced to work for below-minimum wages at the Night of Joy in order to avoid arrest. The owner of the bar, Lana, takes advantage of his situation and makes him work as if he were bought off an auction block and forced into modern day slavery. There lies extreme irony behind this situation as Lana is actually a criminal for distributing pornographic images of herself to high school aged students, while Jones is only guilty of being black. Toole develops this satirical element as the novel progresses and Jones eventually exposes Lana's illegal side business. Jones' character serves to highlight the discriminatory nature of American society by flipping the stereotypical roles of black and white Americans in an ironic