Kuorick, Thackeray and the memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.

This theme of father versus son, and of the cyclical nature of things more generally, dominates both novel and film. Barry's youth is very soon burdened by a father who leads a fatuous life and "deserts" him in a silly duel. Hereafter, during crucial moments in his life, Barry gets to know several substitute fathers. The positive father figures are represented by Grogan, Potzdorf-, and Balibari. They take Barry under their protection and impart to him a certain experience of life. Quin and Mr. Brady represent the negative father figures. They treat Barry as an immature boy and make a fool of him in his love-affair with Nora. These positive and negative father figures also mirror each other. The wise Grogan is the very opposite of the ridiculous Quin and the libertine Chevalier de Balibari is the counterpart of the disciplined Potzdorf-. 17 The relationship between Barry and the Chevalier is particularly stressed by both Thackeray and Kubrick, their close tie already evident from the resemblance of their names: Balibari as a quasi-Italian variant of Redmond's family name, in which it is hard not to see a reference to Jeanne DuBarry, one of the most successful female parvenu's of the eighteenth century.tg It is the Chevalier who appoints Barry as his servant-another picaresque detail-and subsequently introduces him into higher circles. Their alliance assumes a very literal form when Barry, during his flight from Prussia, disguises himself as his patron and in this way symbolically enters the enchanting world of the aristocratic beau monde. Sir Charles Lyndon is a more ambiguous father-figure. In the film he is an elderly, disabled rival who is ruthlessly pushed aside by a Barry who is in the prime of his life. In the novel, however, Sir Charles has a certain sympathy for the insolent, impetuous Barry. Realising that Barry is heading for disaster, he even provides him with the fatherly advice never to marry Lady Lyndon: "Fool that I was! I had enough with my pensions, perfect freedom. the best society in Europe; and I gave up all these, and married, and was miserable. Take a warning by me, Captain Barry, and stick to the trumps" (Thackeray 183). In the film this warning lies enclosed in Sir Charles's invalidity, a symbolic reference to the fate that awaits Barry at the end of the film. Later, when Barry himself has to fulfil the role of father, he fails miserably both toward his own son Bryan as toward his stepson Bullingdon. In the end, Barry's greatest defeat doesn't lie so much in his failed marriage, his lack of a peerage, or (in the novel) his unsuccessful political career, but in this disastrous fatherhood: "For a man is not a complete Mensch until he is the father of a family, to be which is a condition of his existence, and therefore a duty of his education" (Thackeray 94).19

Rituals and feelings