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Achewood => Achewood => Topic started by: gearnest on June 20, 2005, 02:48:00 pm

Title: Pat and Ignatius J. Reilly--kindred spirits?
Post by: gearnest on June 20, 2005, 02:48:00 pm
I just finished rereading "A Confederacy of Dunces", the novel that won John Kennedy Toole a posthumous Pulitzer in 1981.  For anyone else who has read it. . . would you agree that the protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly and Pat are possibly related???

Here's a sample. . . Ignatius is employed (briefly) by the Levy ##### company, and he sends out this letter over his boss's signature:

Abelman's Dry Goods
Kansas City, Missouri
U.S.A.

Mr. I. Abelman, Mongoloid, Esq.:
     We have received via post your absurd comments about our trousers,
the comments revealing, as they did, your total lack of contact with
reality.  Were you more aware, you would know or realize by now that the offending trousers were dispatched to you with our full knowledge that they were inadequate so far as length was concerned.
     "Why? Why?" you are in your incomprehensible babble, unable to
assimilate stimulating concepts of commerce into your retarded and
blighted worldview.
     The trousers were sent to you (1)as a means of testing your
initiative (A clever, wide-awake business concern should be able to
make three-quarter length trousers a by-word of masculine fashion.
Your advertising and merchandising programs are obviously faulty.) and
(2)as a means of testing your ability to meet the standards requisite
in a distributor of our quality product.  (Our loyal and dependable
outlets can vend any trouser bearing the Levy label no matter how
abominable their design and construction.  You are apparently a
faithless people.)
     We do not wish to be bothered in the future by such tedious
complaints.  Please confine your correspondence to orders only.  We are
busy and dynamic organization whose mission needless effrontery and
harassment can only hinder.
     If you molest us again, sir, you may feel the sting of the lash across
your pitiful shoulders.


Yours in anger,
Gus Levy, Pres.