The Memories of Barry Lyndon, Esq, aka The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844, written by William Makepeace Thackeray)As you might be surprised to hear, the novel Stanley Kubrick adapted into a movie Barry Lyndon is somewhat different, albeit very similar in nature. In both stories, the troubles and adventures of young Redmond Barry begin with a woman, Nora Brady, his cousin, with whom he is infatuated with. While young Nora toys with the affections of a young boy, her family has bigger plans for her in the form of John Quinn, a British officer, who has a steadier income than the poor Barry, who lives in a small cottage with his mother who dotes him and has filled his head with tales of the former grandeur of his family.
Infuriated by his dismissal, the youngster challenges the officer to a duel, which he wins. Because of this, he has to leave his home in order to avoid the prison and so he sets out towards Dublin. But young Redmond is still oblivious of the dangers of the world and ends up getting cheated out of his money while he insisted on living like the gentlemen he has always known he is.
Creditors at his heels Redmond enlists in the army, ending up in Germany to fight in the Seven Years' War. Barry hates the military life, seeing being a lowly soldier as beneath his true stature. While he is a good soldier, he is disobedient to the brass, which causes him trouble. By a change of luck, Redmond ends up taking care of a wounded officer he hauls to a German inn to recover. There he takes up a ruse of playing insanity and finally makes a gambit by stealing the officer's clothes and papers and deserting the army towards Prussia.
His newfound luck doesn't last. A Prussian officer he meets realizes Redmond to be a deserter and soon he finds himself enlisted in the Prussian army, which is much worse than its British counterpart. After a time, Redmond arrives in Berlin, where he is tasked to spy on a foreigner by the name of Balibari. In a stroke of luck, the man is actually Redmond's uncle, who takes him under his wing and together they plot their escape.
After their escape, the duo makes their living by gambling. During this time, Redmond figures the best way to become rich is to get married, which finally becomes a possibility after he meets the countess of Lyndon, a rich noblewoman who is married to a sickly older man. A Series of misadventures finally lead into his marriage to lady Lyndon and he takes up the name Barry Lyndon in an attempt to restore his old family name.
The marriage is far from being a happy one. Redmond's stepson, Lord Bullingdon detest the man and his mother, while he does love his brother sired by Redmond. Lady Lyndon and Redmond quarrel a lot and he spends his time womanizing and drinking and spending the family fortune on poor business and old friends.
When it's reported that Lord Bullingdon has died in the American Independence War, the rumours blaming Redmond for orchestrating his death in order to make his own son the heir to the fortune and name begin to circulate. The nobility begins to shun him and the creditors to ask for their money back. There are also stories of Redmond and his mother keeping lady Lyndon imprisoned in her own home so that she would not divorce her lout of a husband. The final nail on the misfortunes of Redmond happens when his own son dies in a riding accident.
In the end, Redmond loses it all when he is forced to divorce his wife by the machinations of her cousin. He is driven out from England and promised a yearly stipend and his freedom if he stays out. When he finally does return, as a poor wretch, he ends up imprisoned in Fleet Prison for the rest of his life. There he spends the rest of his 19-years, visited only by his mother, who watches him slowly drink himself to death because of the still generous yearly stipend by his former wife.
The story of Redmond Barry is told entirely from his own perspective. He is keen to make himself look better than anyone else, boasting of his skills and gentlemanly manners. If he does something questionable, he belittles his doings and comments on how everyone else is doing the same. The common people he sees as a rabble, in the Lords and Ladies of Europe he sees himself and what they have he reckons he is entitled to.
whatever redeeming qualities Redmond Barry might have had as a young lad who was madly in love with Nora Brady, the older he gets, the more shrewd and dislikeable he becomes. The older he gets, the blinder of those traits he becomes as well, succumbing more and more into drunken debauchery, lamely pardoning himself of his own conduct on one reason or another.
One of the greatest reasons for Redmond's behaviour towards his wife is, that his own name has no weight whatsoever. All the credit and business comes his way only through people who trust in the name of Lady Lyndon and she is not always keen to sign her name under the dealings of her husband. He often describes Lady Lyndon as a lazy airhead, but she does seem to have more sense for business than Redmond does.
In the end, all the dealings of Redmond's go sideways, the people to who he had squandered his money were only interested in that, his money and nothing else, seeing him as an easy target. With his own behaviour, he ends up losing his money and throwing away his wife, who in the end was the biggest stroke of luck he ever had in his life. But for the man he was, this luck was not enough, as he was too eager to prove himself to the world in a game he didn't quite know how to play.
Stanley Kubrick took some liberties with the story of Barry Lyndon, but I do think the essence remains. While the book can be seen as a tale told by an unreliable narrator, they both tell a story of a man who manages to climb the social ladder through his own tenacity and shrewdness. They also show how he falls because of his own hubris. They fall a bit differently, in the movie young Lord Bullingdon shoots him during a duel, which leads Redmond to walk, or limp with one leg, away towards a lesser life, but in both versions, the reason is more or less the same, as is, I reckon, the moral of the story.
Redmond Barry is a ruthless adventurer, who goes through life thinking he deserves more than he was born with. While he does manage to get to his goal, albeit how momentarily that is, he finally does fall. Even in his misfortune, he has some amount of luck, Lady Lyndon being soft of heart and granting him a small stipend, which is not enough for him just like his marriage to Lady Lyndon wasn't enough for him.
Like in all things in his life, the biggest failures of Redmond's life can be traced to his own greed and smugness. While there might have been a man inside him he saw himself as, it wasn't in his nature the stay as that man, because in the end, even had he achieved all of his goals, that would not have been enough for him. For a man like him, nothing is ever enough.
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