[FRIAM] John Kennedy Toole and Cervantes

[Jochen Fromm]

I have seen a TV documentary about John Kennedy Toole and his book "A confederacy of Dunes" today. The book seems to be funny for the same reason that Cervantes' Don Quixote is funny: the main character is an idiot who thinks he is a genius and all the others are in a confederacy against him. In a sense Ignatius J. Reilly is like the Don Quixote of capitalism. A lazy slacker who refuses to fit in a world ruled by profit. Somehow it reminded me of Donald Trump too. Maybe John Kennedy Toole could have been an American Cervantes like Hermann Melville and Harper Lee, if only he had lived a bit longer? It is a bit tragic that his work has been rejected during his lifetime and yet he got a Pulitzer prize afterwards, isn't it? -J.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20230928/57f3d9e2/attachment.html>