Ignatius Reilly Statue

All over the world, fictional characters have been immortalised as statues, chief among them Sherlock Holmes in London, Don Quixote in Spain and Hamlet in Stratford-upon-Avon. Equally compelling is the statue of Ignatius Reilly on Canal Street at the entrance of New Orleans’s French Quarter. Literature junkies will immediately recognise him as the protagonist in John Kennedy Toole’s ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’. The novel is about the picaresque character of Reilly, a kind of modern day Don Quixote and his exploits in search of employment. The novel is set in New Orleans, especially the French Quarter. The work was published posthumously, which won Toole a Pulitzer.