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Chapter 1, Part 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Confederacy of Dunces, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Medievalism, Modernity, and Fate
The Legacy of Slavery
Sexuality, Attraction, and Repulsion
Freedom
Appearance, Identity, and Disguise
Hypocrisy and Self-Interest
Summary
Analysis
In the police station, Claude Robichaux (the old man whom Patrolman Mancuso arrested) sits in a cell alongside a black man in sunglasses named Burma Jones, who is also under arrest. Claude lays his identification cards out on his knee and Jones watches him curiously and asks why he has been arrested. Claude says that he doesn’t know, and Jones is amazed by this. Jones says that black people are always being arrested for no reason, but that the same doesn’t often happen to white people.
Claude has not committed any crime and believes that his identity cards—which comply with regulations—will protect him. This shows that Claude has faith in the American system, which claims to protect citizen’s freedoms, even though he has just been wrongfully arrested. Burma Jones, in contrast, has no such faith in the system because, as a black man in the 1960s (just after the introduction of civil rights laws for black people and the abolition of segregation laws in the South) his freedom is always under threat. Racial prejudice, based in the South’s legacy of slavery, meant that black people were often discriminated against by the authorities and were widely believed to be criminals, even when they committed no crime. Jones thus believes that American society is hypocritical because it claims to support the freedom of black people but, in practice, does not.
Themes
Claude explains that he called Patrolman Mancuso, a communist. Jones says that if he had done that, he’d have been in prison by now. Jones explains that he has been framed. Someone stole a bag of cashew nuts from Woolsworth when he was in there and the guard blamed him. Even though he doesn’t have the nuts, he says that the police will probably go out and buy some just to set him up. He reckons the guard stole the nuts himself, anyway.
Jones is fully aware that he, as a black man, is treated more harshly than Claude, a white man. While Claude as, at least, involved in an altercation with a police officer, which explains his arrest, Jones was simply in a shop where a crime was been committed. This suggests that there was systemic racism within the police force during this time—if a white person committed a crime, they could easily pin it on a black person. Black Americans faced the constant threat of incarceration simply because of their race—something which white Americans did not experience.
Themes
The sergeant behind the desk calls Claude up to speak to him. Patrolman Mancuso hovers in the background and Claude lays his cards in the desk and miserably tries to explain himself. When the sergeant learns that Patrolman Mancuso tried to arrest Ignatius, who was just waiting for his mother, he turns on Mancuso and says that they will need to “fix him up.” The sergeant dismisses Claude—who is in tears—and tells Mancuso to take him home. Jones watches in amazement from his cell.
The sergeant’s harsh response when he hears that Patrolman Mancuso has tried to arrest a white man for no reason suggests that white people’s freedoms are respected by American authorities. It is, therefore, embarrassing for a policeman to wrongfully imprison a white person. However, American society is shown to be hypocritical because these same rules do clearly do not apply to black citizens—the sergeant does not have the same reaction to Jones’s arrest, even though Jones has not committed a crime.
Themes
