A Confederacy of Dunces

Toole's New Orleans is a hot, cluttered comic stage: a medievalist crank in a hunting cap wages war on the modern world from his mother's shotgun house Uptown out to the department-store clock on Canal Street, the neon of Bourbon Street, the French Quarter where he peddles hot dogs, and a failing pants factory down by the river. The map runs from Uptown across the Central Business District and French Quarter to Bywater.

Ignatius J. Reilly

The D.H. Holmes clock, Canal Street

Chapter 1

The book begins with the hero loitering under a landmark department-store clock, waiting for his mother and sneering at the crowd of shoppers around him. The store is long gone, redeveloped into a hotel, but a bronze figure in a hunting cap now stands under a replica clock to mark where the comedy starts.

Chapter 1

explicit The novel opens by name at the clock outside the D.H. Holmes department store on Canal Street; the store closed in 1989 and the building is now a hotel, with a statue of the hero marking the spot at 819 Canal.

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Ignatius J. Reilly

The Reilly house, Constantinople Street

Chapter 1

The hero lives with his widowed mother in a cramped house on a quiet Uptown street, holed up in a back room writing screeds against the modern age. The author names the street but no address; the humble shotgun houses in the 600 block have long been read as the model for the home.

Chapter 1

inferred Toole names Constantinople Street in Uptown but never gives a number; local research points to the modest shotgun houses in the 600 block of the Touro neighbourhood, so this marks that block.

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