Barry Lyndon Reading Order

The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844, revised 1856) by William Makepeace Thackeray is the first-person memoir of Redmond Barry, an Irish adventurer who rises from poverty to aristocratic marriage through a combination of cunning, violence, and charm, and who narrates his own story with a magnificent unreliability that Thackeray makes the novel's central joke — Barry is one of the great unreliable narrators in literature, a man who describes his own brutality as boldness and his own dishonesty as cleverness while the gap between his account and what the events actually reveal grows steadily wider. The novel anticipates Vanity Fair's social satire but focuses it through the single consciousness of a villain, and it was one of Thackeray's own favorites among his works despite being less celebrated than Vanity Fair.