4 ideas
Hired as a filing clerk at the failing Levy Pants factory in New Orleans, Ignatius J. Reilly throws the files away instead of filing them. He then tries to lead the Black factory workers in a 'Crusade for Moorish Dignity' that collapses into a farce. By accident, a libelous letter he wrote to a customer ends up exposing the owner's neglect, and this helps set in motion the firm's reform.
Toole's novel was rejected by publishers, and he killed himself in 1969. His mother Thelma kept pressing a smeared carbon copy on reluctant readers for years. In 1976 she got Walker Percy at Loyola to read it; LSU Press published it in 1980, and it won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
The book's epigraph from Swift says that when a true genius appears, you can know him because the dunces are all in confederacy against him. Ignatius turns this into a closed system: every rejection, firing, or humiliation counts as proof of his superiority and of a debased world. As a result, no feedback can ever get through, and the belief is never tested.
Ignatius borrows Boethius's idea that Fortune spins a wheel that lifts people up and throws them down. He uses it to recast his own laziness and bad choices as cosmic bad luck ('Oh, Fortuna, you degenerate wanton!'). A philosophy meant to teach calm acceptance becomes a way to blame the universe and avoid agency.