![]() ![]() On the one hand, the fact that Ignatius cannot be contained is a sign of his uniqueness. So when he is hired to file, he throws out the files, and when he is hired to be a hot dog vendor, well, he eats the hot dogs. The novel consists of people trying to shove him into one nutshell after another (these nutshells often look like jobs), and watching him wriggle enormously out of them. Ignatius's refusal to be contained in a nutshell is not just a matter of girth, though, and his stubbornness matches his bulk. ![]() When he "shifts from one hip to another in his lumbering elephantine fashion waves of flesh" (1.2) roll and belch, causing nutshells to weep and fracture from sheer frustration. Reilly-and Ignatius is a very big fellow indeed. The biggest reason the novel is hard to fit in a nutshell, though, is because so much of it deals with Ignatius J. In part, this is because the novel is picaresque, meaning it's a bunch of episodic adventures sprawling across the (mostly) seedier side of New Orleans. It's hard to get A Confederacy of Dunces in a nutshell. ![]()
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