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Article: Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces Chapter 14: psychological bankruptcy?(John Kennedy Toole)(Critical essay)
- Article from:
- Notes on Contemporary Literature
- Article date:
- March 1, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Notes on Contemporary Literature. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The fourteenth and final chapter of John Kennedy Toole's casts doubts upon the wild episodes of the first thirteen: as he is being rescued from an approaching psychiatric ambulance by Myrna Minkoff, mad protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly acknowledges to his succubus that the countless spiral notebooks that she helps him pack into her tiny Renault--a narrative of life on the streets of New Orleans, the thirteen chapters that the reader has just experienced--contain nothing but the fantasies that occurred to him behind the closed bedroom door in his mother's house.
This acknowledgement might be simply a bone he throws to Myrna's prejudices about him. Though her first ...