Lincoln in the Bardo

The Most Formally Ambitious Novel of Its Decade

George Saunders spent two decades writing some of the finest short fiction in American literature before producing his debut novel, and Lincoln in the Bardo arrives with the ambition of someone who has been thinking about the form for a very long time. The novel takes place over a single night in February 1862, when Abraham Lincoln visited the crypt of his recently deceased eleven-year-old son Willie, and it is narrated by the dead.

The Bardo is a Tibetan Buddhist concept — the transitional state between death and rebirth. Saunders populates his with the dead of Georgetown’s Oak Hill Cemetery, each trapped by their inability to accept what has happened: they prefer to believe they are merely “sick” rather than dead, that they are in “sick boxes” rather than coffins, that the young dead must be helped back to the living world rather than guided toward what follows. Into this community comes Willie Lincoln, and the novel becomes a negotiation among the dead about what to do with a presidential child while above them Abraham Lincoln grieves.

The Form

The narrative is delivered through two channels: the voices of the dead (identified as theatrical dialogue) and fragments of historical documentation — period newspaper accounts, memoirs, diaries — that describe Lincoln on this night from various perspectives. The historical fragments are frequently contradictory: two witnesses cannot agree on the color of Lincoln’s eyes, the size of the gathering, or the expression on his face. Saunders is making a point about how history is constructed from partial, biased, unreliable accounts.

What It Earns

The formal dazzle can obscure the novel’s emotional center: a father unable to leave his dead child, and a community of dead who must help him go. The connection between Lincoln’s private grief and his nation’s grief — the Civil War was killing tens of thousands while Willie lay dying — gives the novel a scale that makes the grief feel historical as well as personal.

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Willie Lincoln in Historical Context

The novel’s premise has a factual foundation: Abraham Lincoln did visit the crypt of his son Willie, who died on February 20, 1862, in the Oak Hill Cemetery. He is reported to have visited the tomb on at least two occasions after the burial. Saunders builds the fiction from this documented detail, taking the confirmed visit and populating the night around it with invention: the voices of the dead, the Bardo’s community, and the specific drama of a community of ghosts confronting a presidential child.

Willie’s death occurred during one of the most devastating periods of the Civil War, when Lincoln was making decisions that would determine the deaths of tens of thousands. The private grief and the public catastrophe were simultaneous, and Saunders’s novel insists on this simultaneity: the father holding his dead child and the commander-in-chief sending young men to die exist in the same body, and the novel’s emotional center is precisely the point where these two forms of grief become indistinguishable.

The Documentary Method

The historical fragments that interrupt the Bardo narrative — newspaper accounts, memoirs, diary entries, letters — do more than authenticate the historical setting. Their contradictions are structural: two documents describe Lincoln’s eyes and disagree about their color; three accounts of the same gathering offer different details that cannot all be correct. Saunders is making an argument about historical knowledge itself: that the past reaches us through partial, biased, conflicting testimony, and that what we believe we know about any historical event is a construction assembled from such testimony rather than a direct access to what happened.

This argument has implications for the novel’s central figure. The Abraham Lincoln of historical consciousness is already a construction — assembled from documents, images, biographies, myths, and the specific cultural needs of successive generations. Saunders’s fictional Lincoln is aware of himself as a president, as a public figure, as a man whose decisions have already become history. The private man grieving a private death exists inside this awareness, and the novel’s pathos depends on that coexistence.

The Bardo Spirits as Ensemble

The community of dead at Oak Hill Cemetery is one of the novel’s great achievements. Each spirit is trapped by a particular form of attachment — to a body, a business, a relationship, a desired experience left incomplete — and each is characterized with enough specificity that the ensemble develops over the novel’s course into something resembling a society. The comedy of the spirits’ refusal to acknowledge their own death — the “sick boxes,” the insistence that they are merely ill — is the novel’s most consistently funny element, and the fact that it is both funny and genuinely sad is characteristic of Saunders’s best work.

Roger Bevins III and Hans Vollman are the novel’s most sustained characters among the dead, and their friendship across death’s threshold gives the novel an emotional through-line that the polyphonic structure might otherwise lack. Their mutual concern for Willie, and for what his presence in the Bardo means, drives the narrative forward through the formal complexity of the documentary interruptions.

Man Booker Prize

Lincoln in the Bardo won the Man Booker Prize in 2017, which confirmed the novel’s literary reputation while introducing it to the international readership that prize generates. The prize recognition was notable because the novel was experimental in ways that prize juries sometimes resist: its formal apparatus is demanding, its narrator is a community rather than an individual, and its emotional claims are made through indirection rather than directness. That the prize went to it anyway reflects both the quality of the novel and a prize committee willing to honor formal ambition alongside emotional achievement.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — A formally virtuosic debut novel from one of America’s finest short fiction writers, achieving genuine emotional power when its experimental architecture allows the grief at its center to breathe.