A Confederacy of Dunces

You might think I am a little strange and unpredictable. One minute I am extolling the virtues of an inspirational work of non-fiction like Breaking Night, and the next minute I am extolling the virtues of a humorous, satirical work of fiction, like A Confederacy of Dunces, which is an outrageous depiction of some colorful characters in New Orleans.

Deceased author John Kennedy Toole pulls no punches in his depictions of the characters in A Confederacy of Dunces
The main character is a grotesquely obese man named Ignatius J. Reilly. He is thirty years old, and has spent his life mooching off his mother, a sweet alcoholic woman with maroon hair. With encouragement from a police officer who befriends her after investigating an auto accident caused by her driving while intoxicated, Mr. Reilly's mother finally makes her son go out and apply for a job. He gets the job as a filing clerk for a firm that makes pants. His filing method consists of tossing files in the trash when the hapless office manager is not looking. The office manager is impressed at Reilly's speed and efficiency in moving the mounds of paperwork.

A black man named Jones barely avoids a vagrancy charge by taking a job cleaning up a bar owned by a woman who makes money from scamming orphans. He plans on keeping the job, even though the pay is outrageously low, because he wants to gather evidence against the bar owner on the orphan scam.

Ignatius fancies himself superior to all other humans; in other words, he is an elitist liberal. As such, he believes he is a champion of "social justice," and he decides to visit the sweatshop owned by the pants-making company. There he finds poor blacks supposedly toiling making pants. That is where I am in the reading of the book.