A Confederacy of Dunces: Chapters 4–7

Attached to this building, which Mr. Gonzalez referred to as “the brain center,” was the factory, a barnlike prototype of an airplane hangar.

“No! You must never move a person with a broken back unless you have a stretcher. I won’t be paralyzed through your incompetence.”

The thud of Ignatius’ fall had attracted Miss Trixie from the ladies’ room; she came around the files and tripped on the mountain of supine flesh.

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 byword 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.

Those of you who are fellow office workers and find yourselves reading this incisive journal during a coffee break or such might take note of one or two of my innovations.

I brought to his attention the sign (Yes, reader, it has finally been painted and posted; a rather imperial fleur-de-lis now gives it added significance.), but that, too, elicited little interest on his part.

As I have told you in earlier installments, I was emulating the poet Milton by spending my youth in seclusion, meditation, and study in order to perfect my craft of writing as he did

I have heard more than a little hissing and roaring through the factory door, but my presently somewhat enervated condition precludes a descent into that particular inferno at the moment.

I only hope that you have not damaged her morale.

I have discovered that Miss Trixie considers luncheon meat a rather toothsome delicacy.

Grant me a little peace. Isn’t it enough that I am harried all day long at work?

She appeared to be fashioning a rather colorful but nonetheless rakish evening gown.

This action on my part led to a rather loud and defiantly boorish roar of protest from the collective workers, who began to regard me with sullen eyes.

I realized then that I had no more to fear concerning my faux pas in turning off their music.

I do admire the terror which Negroes are able to inspire in the hearts of some members of the white proletariat and only wish (This is a rather personal confession.) that I possessed the ability to similarly terrorize.

We must hasten back on the wings of prose to the factory and its folk, who prompted my rather lengthy digression.

As I was telling you, they had just lifted me from the floor, my performance and subsequent pratfall the sources of a great feeling of camaraderie.

I was uninjured, and since pride is a Deadly Sin which I feel I generally eschew, absolutely nothing was hurt.

Still it was incredible that the disparity between the doldrums of the production line and the fevered hustle of the office could be housed within the same (Levy Pants) bosom.

While I was desultorily attending graduate school, I met in the coffee shop one day a Miss Myrna Minkoff, a young undergraduate, a loud, offensive maiden from the Bronx.

The trauma of our first meeting fed each other’s masochism and led to an affair (platonic) of sorts.

I must admit that I always suspected Myrna of being interested in me sensually; my stringent attitude toward sex intrigued her

The Negroes, it seems, preferred more contemporary music and turned up their transistor radios loudly and defiantly whenever Myrna began one of her lugubrious dirges.

The subsidiary theme in the correspondence is one urging me to come to Manhattan so that she and I may raise our banner of twin confusion in that center of mechanized horrors.

My intense devotion to the cause of justice has led to this lengthy diatribe, and I feel that my Levy circle-within-a-circle is zooming upward to new successes and heights.

In the air there is always the heavy, cloying odor of the alcohol distillery on the river, an odor that becomes suffocating on hot summer afternoons when the breeze blows in from the river.

“Good morning, sir,” Ignatius said brusquely, his scarf-shawl flying horizontally in his wake like the flag of some mobilized Scottish clan.

This banner alone gives form and credence to the agitation.

I don’t want that senile bag out here. Whatever happened to your bridge club?

Then he said, “I suspect that you imagine ‘Turkey in the Straw’ to be a valuable bit of Americana. Well, it is not. It is a discordant abomination.”

Don’t I need clearance from the Health Department or something? I mean, I might have something beneath my fingernails that is very debilitating to the human system.

To pacify his mother and to improve conditions at home, he had given her The Consolation of Philosophy, an English translation of the work that Boethius had written while unjustly imprisoned, and had told her to give it to Patrolman Mancuso so that he might peruse it while sealed in his booth.

Just look at your loathsome complexion.

Behind the bathroom door Ignatius was lying passively in the tepid water pushing the plastic soap dish back and forth across the surface with one finger and listening now and then to his mother on the telephone.

Mr. Clyde had a certain paternal quality that Ignatius liked; the old man, the scarred and wizened mogul of the frankfurter, would be a welcome new character in the Journal.

Who needs a girl who isn’t dedicated enough to work gratis in a project that would benefit her race?

Well, I am not going to participate in this idiotic conversation. Carry on a monologue out there if you wish.

You've probably regressed completely by now, living in that substandard old house with only your mother for company.

Actually, my personal life has undergone a metamorphosis: I am currently connected in a most vital manner with the food merchandising industry, and therefore I doubt quite seriously whether I shall have much time in the future to correspond with you.