Lincoln in the Bardo: Chapter 103 Summary & Analysis

When Vollman and Bevins reach Elise Traynor, she is in the form of a “smoking wreck of a rail car, several dozen charred and expiring individuals trapped within her.” “We are sorry,” the friends shout. “Sorry that we did not do more to convince you to go, back when you still had the chance.” One of the perishing individuals inside the wreck points out that they did “slink away” as the girl succumbed, and this comment shames Vollman so much that he draws himself up and approaches the car, all the while manifesting as his future forms: “A beaming fellow in a disordered bed, the morning after he and Anna would have consummated their marriage”; “A father of twin girls”; “A retired printer with bad knees, helped along a boardwalk by that same Anna.” Taking a deep breath, he steps inside the rail car and departs.

The train explodes with Vollman’s departure, throwing Bevins to the ground. When he stands, he sees that the iron fence is the only thing left standing. Advancing toward it, he thinks one last time of the world’s myriad sensory pleasures—“None of it was real; nothing was real,” he tells himself. “Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear. These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought them forth. And now must lose them.” Bidding his final farewell, he says: “I send this out to you, dear friends, before I go, in this instantaneous thought-burst, from a place where time slows and then stops and we may live forever in a single instant.”