Recommendations
Books Like Barry Lyndon
Best books to read after Barry Lyndon by Thackeray
William Makepeace Thackeray's picaresque novel (1844, revised 1856) — the unreliable first-person memoir of Redmond Barry, Irish adventurer who rises from poverty to aristocratic marriage through cunning, violence, and charm, narrating his own brutality as heroism; one of the greatest unreliable narrators in literature and the predecessor to Vanity Fair's broader social satire. These recommendations extend the experience through the tradition of the rogue narrator, through eighteenth-century picaresque fiction, and through Thackeray's other major works.
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Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
Thackeray's masterwork and the most direct companion to Barry Lyndon — where Barry Lyndon focuses the social satire through the consciousness of a single unreliable rogue, Vanity Fair distributes it across a panoramic social canvas with an authorial puppet-master rather than a self-serving narrator; the two together show Thackeray's full range as a satirical novelist.
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Tom Jones
by Henry Fielding
Fielding's eighteenth-century picaresque is Barry Lyndon's most important predecessor — where Tom Jones is narrated by an omniscient author who regards his roguish hero with affection, Thackeray inverts the structure by letting Barry narrate himself; the gap between Tom Jones's omniscient narrator and Barry Lyndon's self-serving narrator defines the evolution of the picaresque form.
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Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
Nabokov's novel is the twentieth century's most celebrated unreliable narrator, and Humbert Humbert's self-justifying prose is the direct descendant of Barry's self-glorification — both narrators are guilty of serious crimes against the people they claim to love, and both construct elaborate verbal defenses that the reader is required to see through; the comparison illuminates what the unreliable confession does as a literary form.
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Moll Flanders
by Daniel Defoe
Defoe's early novel (1722) features the most important female predecessor to Barry as a self-narrating rogue — Moll's account of her thieving and sexual adventures shares Barry's combination of picaresque adventure with defensive unreliability; the two narrators show the same genre's range across gender.
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Pendennis
by William Makepeace Thackeray
Thackeray's semi-autobiographical novel (1848-50), written immediately after Vanity Fair, is the most useful companion to Barry Lyndon within Thackeray's own work — Arthur Pendennis's social adventures and romantic disappointments are the gentler, more sympathetic version of the Thackeray social novel, in contrast to Barry's satirical extremity.
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The Tin Drum
by Günter Grass
Grass's novel features Oskar Matzerath, one of the great twentieth-century unreliable narrators — a man who deliberately arrested his own growth at age three and narrates the history of Danzig from an asylum; where Barry's unreliability is social and self-aggrandizing, Oskar's is ontological and politically ironic; both novels use the rogue narrator's self-serving perspective as a lens for historical critique.
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Barry Lyndon (Film)
by Stanley Kubrick
Kubrick's 1975 adaptation of Barry Lyndon is one of the great literary adaptations in cinema — though the film strips the first-person narration that is the novel's central device and replaces it with a detached third-person voice, the visual grandeur and the elegiac sadness of Kubrick's treatment create a very different but equally serious work of art; essential viewing for readers of the novel.
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Lucky Jim
by Kingsley Amis
Amis's comic novel (1954) is the twentieth-century British descendant of the Thackeray comic tradition — Jim Dixon's self-interested social maneuvering in a provincial university has the same ironic distance between the protagonist's self-image and the reader's perception that makes Barry Lyndon work; the comparison illuminates the long reach of Thackeray's satirical mode.
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