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

I can recollect a certain day, about three weeks after the battle of Minden, and a farmhouse of which some of us entered; and how the old woman and her daughters served us, trembling, to wine; and how we got drunk over the wine, and the house was in a flame, presently: and woe betide the wretched fellow afterwards who came home to look for his house and his children! (71)

Later on, in his marriage with Lady Lyndon, his conduct cannot exactly be called exemplary either:

... if, I say, in our disputes she pretended to have the upper hand, to assert her authority against mine, to refuse to sign such papers as I might think necessary for the distribution of our large and complicated property, I would have Master Bryan carried off to Chiswick for a couple of days; and I warrant me his lady-mother could hold out no longer, and would agree to anything I chose to propose. (244)

The fact that, in such passages, Redmond Barry doesn't get completely discredited, has a lot to do with Thackeray's implicit and constantly present question of where his nineteenthcentury readers, living in a society that considered naked ambition and opportunistic materialism of increasing importance, should find the right to condemn Barry's behavior.

It is quite remarkable that Kubrick, who probably didn't want to create a second Alex DeLarge, has grinded away the sharpest traits of Barry's character. Though he also suggests that his protagonist has misbehaved himself in the army, the images do not dwell on this very explicitly. Only one of Barry's commanding officers makes a direct remark in this direction: "You're a gallant soldier and have evidently come from good stock, but you're idle, dissolute and unprincipled. You have done a great deal of harm to the men and for all your talents and bravery, I'm sure you will come to no good." The fact that Barry has been able to have a bad influence on his fellow soldiers gets extra emphasis in view of an earlier remark by the narrator:

At the close of the Seven Years' War, the army so renowned for its disciplined valour was officered by native Prussians. But it was composed for the most part of men from the lowest levels of humanity, hired or stolen from almost every nation in Europe. Thus Barry fell into the very worst of causes and company and was soon very far advanced in the science of every kind of misconduct.

Still, for lack of "visual evidence" of his misbehavior, Kubrick's Barry remains much longer than in the novel a brave, somewhat naive young man who tries to find his way in life as well as he can. The casting of Ryan O'Neal further indicates that Kubrick has deliberately turned away from the Barry that is described by Thackeray: "I am very dark and swarthy in complexion, and was called by our fellows the "Black Englander," the "Schwarzer Englander," or the "English devil" (103). Only from the time of the marriage with Lady Lyndon does Kubrick seem prepared to show the negative aspects of Barry's character more openly. This turnaround is set in motion in the scene in which Barry, on his way to Castle Hackton, insultingly blows the smoke of his tobacco into the face of his spouse, thus demonstrating how all his youthful, romantic ideals have turned into cynical ambition. All in all, however, Kubrick portrays Barry with a lot more sympathy than most other characters: his dominant mother, the boorish soldiers, his sanctimonious wife, the sneaky Runt, and the hypocritical aristocrats. In particular, the tragic way in which his energy and vitality are finally worn down under the pressure of fate and his surroundings must redeem him in the eyes of the viewer. It is precisely this tragic quality that also sets him apart from other infamous eighteenth-century characters like Valmont and de Merteuil. Not only does Barry's misbehavior pale into insignificance compared with the outrages-stemming from pure aristocratic "ennui"-of de Laclos's creatures, it also serves a respectable project: climbing the social scale and founding a family.