Ignatius J. Reilly: The Literary Icon in the Green Hunting Cap

The Green Hunting Cap and the Valve

Ignatius J. Reilly is the protagonist of A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, and he is one of the most memorable, infuriating, and beloved characters in American literature. He is large, overweight, pompous, lazy, brilliant, delusional, and absolutely certain that the modern world is beneath him. He wears a green hunting cap with earflaps that has become his signature look, and he navigates New Orleans with the indignation of a medieval philosopher trapped in a twentieth-century city that he finds vulgar, contemptible, and entirely unworthy of his genius.

The novel, published posthumously in 1980 after Toole's mother championed the manuscript following her son's suicide, is set in the New Orleans of the early 1960s and captures the city with a precision and affection that only a native could achieve. Ignatius moves through the French Quarter, the industrial district, and the nightclubs and hot dog carts of the city, leaving a trail of chaos and philosophical complaints in his wake. His "valve" — a psychosomatic digestive condition that acts up whenever the world offends him, which is constantly — is one of the great running gags in literature.

A New Orleans Character

Ignatius could only exist in New Orleans. The city's tolerance for eccentricity, its embrace of characters who refuse to conform, and its fundamental belief that personality is more interesting than productivity make it the only possible setting for a man who lives with his mother, has never held a real job, and believes himself to be the greatest intellect of his age. In any other city, Ignatius would be pathetic. In New Orleans, he is magnificent.

A bronze statue of Ignatius stands on Canal Street, outside the former D.H. Holmes department store where the novel's opening scene takes place. He is frozen mid-complaint, green hunting cap firmly in place, a monument to the power of New Orleans to produce characters so vivid that they become as real as the city itself. Ignatius J. Reilly never existed, but anyone who has spent time in New Orleans has met him, or someone very much like him, holding court at a bar or on a porch, certain that the world is wrong and he is right.