Barry Lyndon Speaks the Truth

William Makepeace Thackeray's Barry Lyndon is a famously unreliable narrator--as Thackeray's own footnotes comparing Lyndon's recountings to the record attest. However, amid the self-justifying and self-glorifying lies of the tale's exceedingly vain and foolish protagonist there is a good deal of truth about the larger things in the world, not all of which one has to read between the lines to detect, some of it told us plainly by Barry himself. Exemplary of this is what he says of the Seven Years' War in which he personally fought in the army of "'the Protestant hero,' as we used to call the godless old Frederick of Prussia."

As Barry tells us, "[i]t would require a greater philosopher and historian than I am to explain the causes of the famous Seven Years' War in which Europe was engaged," as it is not only the case that the war's origin was "complicated," but "the books written about it so amazingly hard to understand, that I have seldom been much wiser at the end of a chapter than at the beginning." What he does know, however, is the killing and petty thieving and worse of the battlefield where, contrary to nonsense about bygones ages of chivalry, the fighting is done by "starving brutes . . . nursed in poverty, entirely ignorant, made to take a pride in deeds of blood--men who can have no amusement but in drunkenness, debauch, and plunder," such persons the "shocking instruments that your great warriors and kings have been doing their murderous work in the world," so that while the England of his day sang the glories of rulers like Frederick he thinks only of "What a number of items of human crime, misery, slavery, go to form that sum-total of glory!" when, not least, thinking of what he had personally been part of on the march. Indeed, Barry's crimes look rather small next to those of the monarchs the conventional glorify as they condemn Barry's behavior.

Thackeray's satire of the self-seeking and snobbery of the genteel in Vanity Fair can seem rather tame stuff today, "radical" only from the standpoint of a past generation and even then less so than some of those contemporaries of his with whom he is so often compared (like Balzac)--but words like these still cut today, and perhaps the more now than they might have a few years ago as the reality of war, war on a grand scale, impinges ever more heavily on the minds of all but the most obtuse today.