A Confederacy of Dunces: Chapter 5, Part 4 Summary & Analysis

Ignatius does not want to take responsibility for the fine that Irene owes for the car crash because he does not believe he is responsible for what happens to him—rather, fate determines everything. This belief conveniently removes any guilt Ignatius may feel for not helping his mother and allows him to justify his selfish attitude toward her.

Ignatius resents Santa because she has replaced him as the most influential person in Irene’s life. Ignatius previously had a controlling relationship with Irene and believed that he took charge of her life for her own good. However, Ignatius really controlled Irene to benefit himself.

Ignatius deliberately skews his narrative to suggest that Mr. Gonzalez is a tyrant and to justify his own desire to hold a riot at work. As he wishes to use the riot to make himself look socially progressive (in order to annoy his progressive ex-girlfriend, Myrna) Ignatius must imply that Mr. Gonzalez is like a slave owner and therefore needs to be overthrown. In reality, Mr. Gonzalez has little say over the factory conditions. Ignatius deliberately draws the connection between the manufacture of garments (for which the black workers are underpaid) and cotton fields (in which black people worked as slaves). His criticisms of racism and discrimination are in some ways relevant because the black workers are forced to work for low pay to comply with vagrancy laws. However, Ignatius’s aims are essentially selfish and dictatorial, rather than genuinely caring.

Ignatius again invokes Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, which describes a colonizer’s journey into the African Congo and his horror at the chaos and corruption which he witnesses under colonialism. Ignatius compares the factory, in which the black workers are underpaid but otherwise unmolested, to the horrors of colonialism. Ignatius is being dramatic, but there is, again, some validity to the idea that although the black workers are paid for their labor, they are not at the factory through choice. Instead, they face limited career options because of racism and the legacy of slavery in the South, which was a direct result of colonialism and the slave trade, both of which Conrad wrote about.

This passage demonstrates that Ignatius does not understand the people he believes he can set free. He has a condescending attitude toward the black workers: he presumptuously turns their music off and then feels that he has won them over with a childish dance when they are presumably laughing at him, not with him. Ignatius is manipulative in his approach—although he pretends to want to help the workers, he is only interested in proving to his ex-girlfriend, Myrna, that he is progressive. He does not care how the workers may be negatively affected by a riot.

Ignatius redundantly compares his own feelings of lethargy and persecution in modern society to the experience of black people in the South. However, Ignatius’s suffering is most often the result of his own unwillingness to adapt, rather than the result of systemic prejudice. He cannot empathize with the black workers and fails to recognize his own privilege. Ignatius’s belief that it would be fun to terrorize white people on the bus is directly contradicted by Jones’s experience of a white woman who was afraid of him on the bus. In reality, the experience is uncomfortable and upsetting for Jones because he does not want to be viewed as a threat and faces significant personal risk if he is perceived this way by white society.

Ignatius draws a parallel between black slaves and people under medieval feudal systems, and thinks that both states are preferable to modern capitalism. In modern American society, there is an emphasis on personal responsibility—people have individual rights but are partly responsible for their level of income through the job that they choose. Ignatius dislikes this because he does not wish to take responsibility for his life in any way and feels that it would be better to be enslaved. This mindset only emphasizes the fact that Ignatius has never been persecuted in a meaningful way and has no idea how horrible it would be. He simplifies and romanticizes the experience of black Americans because he imagines that it is nice to have all choice removed from life—a slave could not choose how to work but could only comply with the master’s rules. However, he does not acknowledge that he is lucky to have many choices and freedoms compared to a black person, even in the 1960s, when slavery had long been abolished.

Ignatius displays ignorance about why black workers cannot simply change their circumstances and hypocritically imagines that he would do a better job himself, although he does not believe he can change his current circumstances despite being a white man with a great deal of social privilege. Although black people were granted civil rights in the 1960s, the legacy of slavery in America meant that black people were still subject to systemic prejudice. Ignatius believes in a return to a medieval worldview, so his perspective is not only conservative but hundreds of years out of date.

Myrna and Ignatius are simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by each other. Myrna is argumentative and likes the fact that her views irritate Ignatius. Ignatius, too, seems to enjoy conflict and gets a thrill out of provoking both Myrna and the people around them.

Although Myrna believes that her progressive approach to life will help liberate people, this is clearly not always the case. It is implied that Myrna manipulated the Southern girls into having sex with her because the girls were deeply conservative and presumably averse to sex before marriage. Although Myrna feels that she has helped the girls by freeing them from beliefs she finds oppressive, her actions only harmed them. As they girls both end up mentally devastated by the experience, this suggests that Myrna thinks more about herself, and imposing her own worldview on others, than she thinks about the effects of forcing others to change themselves.

Myrna rejects academia because she does not like to have her perspective challenged, even though she considers herself progressive. Myrna, in fact, proves herself as blind to the experience of others as Ignatius is, especially when it comes to the social position of black people in the South. She does not view black people as individuals who can adapt to and become equal citizens in modern American society, but rather as a product of their cultural history that she can use to make herself look charitable and progressive.

It is striking that Ignatius equates Myrna’s inevitable incarceration with her spiritual liberation. It reflects Ignatius’s worldview—that the material world is meaningless (though of course Ignatius enjoys many material pleasures). This is based on medieval philosophy and Boethius’s idea that the world is a prison and that one can only be free in one’s mind. However, it also suggests that Myrna likes to think of herself as persecuted, like Ignatius, because she thinks that she is too wise for modern society and will be locked up because of this. Although Myrna professes to hate persecution, Ignatius suspects that the opposite is true—she craves it, and goes out of her way to be provocative.