More so, in the disparate circumstances facing his primary Black character, Burma Jones, and his primary gay White male character, Dorian Greene, Toole contrasts the imprisoning effects of systemic racism to the liberating pleasures of queer White privilege. Complementing these twin threads of his narrative, Toole also addresses the pervasive discrimination faced by Black and gay people in the novel’s mid-twentieth-century Southern setting, while simultaneously framing the gross mistreatment of vast swaths of humanity as part of his carnivalesque humor. Both quickly collapse into comic disarray. The first involves an insurrection of the underpaid Black employees of Levy Pants the second entails a conspiracy to infiltrate the government with gay White men. Reilly’s riotous exploits in New Orleans, which center around two so-called “crusades” to rescue humanity from its modern-day ills. John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces recounts Ignatius J.
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