Barry Lyndon

Barry Lyndon is Thackeray's coolly ironic picaresque chronicle of Redmond Barry, an Irish adventurer who reinvents himself as a soldier, gambler, social climber, and would-be aristocrat. Framed as an autobiographical confession, the novel derives much of its brilliance from the gap between Barry's self-glorifying narration and the reader's recognition of his vanity, brutality, and delusion. In the tradition of Fielding and Smollett, yet sharpened by Victorian moral skepticism, Thackeray transforms the eighteenth-century tale of fortune into a searching satire of gentility, war, marriage, and class ambition. William Makepeace Thackeray, born in Calcutta in 1811 and educated in England, brought to fiction the eye of a cosmopolitan observer and the skepticism of a journalist and social critic. His own experience of financial instability, club life, publishing, and the hypocrisies of polite society helped shape his distrust of inherited status and romantic pretension. Barry Lyndon anticipates the social anatomies of Vanity Fair in its exposure of worldly success as performance. This book is highly recommended to readers interested in unreliable narration, historical fiction, and the darker comic energies of the nineteenth-century novel. Its elegance, cruelty, and moral intelligence make it one of Thackeray's most incisive works.