George Saunders has long been celebrated for his surreal short stories that blend dark humor with profound moral inquiries. In Lincoln in the Bardo, his Booker Prize-winning first novel, Saunders orchestrates an audacious literary experiment that transforms a historical footnote—Abraham Lincoln visiting his son’s crypt after the boy’s death—into a metaphysical meditation on grief, loss, attachment, and the fundamental human question of how we live well knowing everything we love must end.
The Voices of the Dead: A Chorus of the Departed
Lincoln in the Bardo unfolds in a Georgetown cemetery on a single February night in 1862. Eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln, the president’s beloved son, has just died of typhoid fever, and his inconsolable father has come to the crypt to hold his son’s body. What President Lincoln cannot know is that his son’s spirit lingers in the bardo—a Tibetan Buddhist concept describing the transitional state between death and rebirth—along with a community of ghosts who refuse to acknowledge they are dead, preferring to believe they are merely “sick” and recovering in “sick-boxes.”
The novel employs a startlingly original structure—a polyphonic narrative comprised of fragmented testimonials from both historical sources (some real, some invented) and the fictional spirits inhabiting the cemetery. Among these spectral narrators, three primary characters guide us:
- Hans Vollman, a middle-aged printer killed by a falling beam before he could consummate his marriage to his young wife
- Roger Bevins III, a young gay man who committed suicide after his lover rejected him, only to change his mind too late
- The Reverend Everly Thomas, a mysterious figure who, unlike the others, knows he’s dead but fears moving on due to a glimpse of his judgment that awaits
These characters, trapped in denial of their own deaths and fixated on the unfinished business of their lives, tell their stories with a dark humor and poignancy that feels distinctly Saundersian. Their voices intertwine with dozens of others—from a wealthy miser to former slaves to a crude, perpetually cursing couple—creating a vibrant tapestry of American life and death.
A Bold Formal Innovation
Saunders’s most daring artistic choice is the novel’s structure—a patchwork of voices that reads almost like a play script or documentary film. This experimental approach might initially disorient readers, but it quickly establishes a compelling rhythm that carries us through the story with surprising momentum.
The formal innovation serves the novel’s thematic concerns brilliantly. By having each character speak in their own distinctive voice—often in mid-sentence, interrupting one another—Saunders creates a democracy of perspectives that mirrors the American experiment itself. Every dead soul carries their own regrets, attachments, and misapprehensions about their lives. Their voices—pompous, crude, erudite, profane, poetic—form a chorus of the American experience across class, race, and circumstance.
When Saunders intercuts these fictional voices with real and invented historical quotations about Lincoln, Willie’s death, and the Civil War, he creates a fascinating tension between historical record and imaginative empathy. These sections remind us that history itself is a narrative constructed from fragments, and that understanding the past requires both factual knowledge and imaginative projection.
A Father’s Grief Against the Backdrop of National Tragedy
At its emotional core, Lincoln in the Bardo is a deeply moving portrait of parental grief. Abraham Lincoln, described through the ghosts’ observations and historical accounts, appears utterly broken by the loss of his son. In one of the novel’s most powerful scenes, Lincoln returns to the crypt at night and holds Willie’s corpse, unaware that the boy’s spirit watches, confused and heartbroken.
Against this intimate tragedy, Saunders sets the larger catastrophe of the Civil War. As Lincoln contemplates his personal loss, he simultaneously confronts the thousands of deaths his presidential decisions have caused and will cause. The novel draws a subtle parallel between the individual grief of a father and the collective grief of a nation tearing itself apart.
This juxtaposition raises profound questions about how personal suffering can both blind us to and illuminate the suffering of others. When Lincoln finally leaves the cemetery, having unknowingly helped free his son’s spirit, he carries with him a new resolve to endure his pain while acknowledging the universal nature of suffering:
“All were in sorrow, or had been, or soon would be… We must try to see one another in this way… As suffering, limited beings.”
Critiques: Where the Experiment Sometimes Falters
For all its brilliance, Lincoln in the Bardo has weaknesses that may frustrate some readers. The novel’s fragmented structure, while innovative, occasionally feels too disjointed, particularly in the historical citation sections where multiple sources contradict each other about basic facts like the weather on the night of Willie’s funeral. While this cleverly illustrates how historical truth is elusive, these segments sometimes interrupt the narrative momentum established in the cemetery scenes.
Additionally, some of the ghostly characters verge on caricature. The crude Barons with their relentless profanity and the overly formal speech patterns of some ghosts occasionally feel like refugees from Saunders’s short fiction rather than fully realized characters. The novel also takes time to find its emotional footing—the first third focuses more on establishing the bardo’s rules and introducing its inhabitants than on developing the Lincoln narrative that gives the book its emotional heft.
Finally, the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the bardo seems somewhat thinly incorporated. While it provides a useful framework for the liminal state of the ghosts, the novel doesn’t deeply engage with the spiritual philosophy underlying the concept, which feels like a missed opportunity for deeper metaphysical exploration.
A Transcendent Final Act: Finding Liberation
Despite these quibbles, the novel’s final third achieves a transcendent power that few contemporary works of fiction can match. As the ghosts attempt to help Willie move on—children aren’t meant to linger in the bardo—the novel builds to a climax of astonishing emotional and philosophical depth.
When the cemetery’s spirits collectively enter Lincoln’s consciousness to persuade him to leave, allowing Willie to move on, they experience a profound transformation. Briefly freed from their self-obsessions, they recall forgotten aspects of their lives and glimpse the possibility of liberation. This sequence, in which long-dead characters recover their full humanity through an act of empathy, stands as one of the most moving passages in contemporary literature.
An American Ghost Story for Our Time
With Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders has expanded both his artistic range and American literature itself. The novel belongs to a distinctly American supernatural tradition that includes Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Mark Twain’s ghost stories—works that use the uncanny to explore historical trauma and moral questions at the heart of the American experience.
What makes Saunders’s achievement especially remarkable is how he balances experimental form with profound emotional resonance. Despite its unconventional structure and supernatural premise, Lincoln in the Bardo delivers moments of devastating emotional clarity about grief, responsibility, and the hard-won wisdom that can emerge from suffering.
In an era of national division not unlike Lincoln’s time, Saunders has crafted a ghost story that speaks directly to our present moment. It reminds us that America has always been haunted by its unresolved conflicts and unacknowledged suffering, but also offers hope that through confronting this painful past with empathy and moral courage, we might find a way forward together.
Verdict: A Singular Literary Achievement
Lincoln in the Bardo may not be a perfect novel, but it is unquestionably a major work of American fiction—bold in conception, profound in its emotional intelligence, and utterly unique in literary landscape. For readers willing to surrender to its unconventional form and spectral sensibility, it offers rewards few contemporary novels can match: a deeply moving meditation on mortality, a complex portrait of America’s most mythologized president, and a reminder of fiction’s power to help us understand what it means to be human in the face of inevitable loss.
Those familiar with Saunders’s celebrated short fiction collections like Tenth of December and Pastoralia will recognize his trademark blend of the grotesque and the tender, the satirical and the sincere, but here these qualities are deployed in service of a larger, more ambitious vision. For all its experimental qualities, Lincoln in the Bardo achieves what only the greatest fiction can—it changes how we see the world and reminds us of the mysterious connections between the living and the dead, between personal grief and collective responsibility, between America’s past and its present.
This is a novel that, like the ghosts it portrays, will linger long after you’ve turned the final page.
Lincoln in the Bardo is worth reading for its bold experimentation, emotional depth, and distinctive vision, despite occasional structural unevenness and character development limitations.
For fans of: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, George Saunders’s short fiction, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, experimental literary fiction
