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

A picaresque journey through Europe

Though Kubrick's rendition of Barry's adventures stays close to Thackeray, some striking differences remain. To begin with, quite a few scenes have been eliminated, such as Barry's unfortunate encounter with the Fitzsimmons in Dublin, the affair with Lieutenant Fakenham, the affair with the military recruiter de Galgenstein, Barry's failed attempt to conquer Countess Ida, the tragic history of the Princess of X, the long period during which Barry courts Lady Lyndon and the development of his political career. Besides that, Kubrick has joined together a number of minor characters (e.g. de Galgenstein and Captain Potzdorff) into one solid figure. Furthermore, scenes not present in Thackeray, or hardly worked out by him, have been added to the story, such as Bryan's birthday party, his funeral, the duel with Bullingdon, and the final scene in which Lady Lyndon is confronted with Barry's annuity.8 What Kubrick, as a framework for Barry's adventures, did adopt was Thackeray's formula of the travel story.9 With Kubrick the onset of Barry's wanderings-and with that of all his ambitions-also lies in the moment he is rejected in his adolescent love for Nora Brady:

"For after all, Redmond," she would say, "you are but fifteen, and you hav'n't a guinea in the world"; at which I would swear that I would become the greatest hero ever known out of Ireland, and vow that before I was twenty I would have money enough to purchase an estate six times as big as Castle Brady. (Thackeray 23)10

In his attempt to realize these youthful ambitions, Barry will get to know the adult world in its full brutality: first the grisly reality of war, then the frivolous world of the aristocratic beau monde, and finally the elitist milieu of the English landed nobility. To a large extent Kubrick has also respected the picaresque nature of Thackeray's novel. The essence of the picaresque situation is concisely described by Wicks as that of an "unheroic protagonist, worse than we, caught up in a chaotic world, worse than ours, in which he is on an eternal journey of encounters."11 The tragic fate of the picaro is that he has to fight a hierarchically structured society that has developed extremely effective defense mechanisms against intruders. In his attempts to enter this better world, the picaresque anti-hero is constantly thrown back on himself. In essence he therefore remains an individual isolated within society (Hartveit 9-10). Precisely that isolation, says Hartveit, represents the core of every picaresque story:

humanity's yearning to belong, to be inside, safe and protected-a feeling which is counterpointed by a sense of precariousness, a nightmarish obsession with insecurity and lack of protection-the sum of anxiety centred in the image of the lonely castaway in a bustling community (12).