Lincoln in the Bardo Themes

At the outset of Lincoln in the Bardo, characters from many different walks of life exist independently from one another in the Bardo, a liminal space between death and the afterlife. Even though each character is in the exact same situation, these characters don’t band together. Instead, they focus on themselves and their individual desires to remain in the Bardo. This dynamic changes when Willie Lincoln (the son of Abraham Lincoln) appears, as…

The characters in Lincoln in the Bardo are in a state of transition. Souls like Hans Vollman, Roger Bevins III, Reverend Everly Thomas, and Willie Lincoln are literally in transitional states, since they exist only in the Bardo, a Tibetan word Saunders borrows to refer to a transitory place occupied by people who have died but have not yet moved on. These souls refuse to admit that they have died, instead insisting…

In Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders examines how people frequently fail to see beyond their own differences. For instance, white souls like Lieutenant Cecil Stone occupy the same spiritual realm as black Bardo-dwellers, but they still find themselves incapable of embracing the idea of equality, instead clinging to their bigoted belief that there’s a fundamental difference between white people and black people. Meanwhile, in the world of the living, President Lincoln fights this…

In Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders sets forth the notion that mourning is a process that ideally ends in acceptance. Loss is difficult, he upholds, because it denotes the end of something cherished. At the center of the book is the loss President Lincoln experiences when he’s forced to say goodbye to his beloved child, Willie. Distraught, he finds the idea of carrying on without his son unfathomable. By the end of the…