When George Saunders released his first full-length novel, it felt like a massive risk. Honestly, the guy was the king of the short story—a master of the bite-sized, satirical, and deeply human snippet. Then comes George Saunders Lincoln in the Bardo, a sprawling, ghostly, historical experiment that looks like a play script and reads like a fever dream. It’s weird. It’s messy. It’s also probably one of the most important pieces of American fiction written in the last twenty years.
The premise is deceptively simple. We’re in 1862. The Civil War is grinding bodies into the dirt. Abraham Lincoln’s eleven-year-old son, Willie, has just died of typhoid fever. He’s interred in an Oak Hill Cemetery crypt in Georgetown.
But here is the kicker: the "bardo."
In Tibetan Buddhism, the bardo is a transitional state between death and rebirth. Saunders takes this concept and transplants it into a 19th-century graveyard. It’s populated by "sullied" spirits who don't quite realize they are dead. They call their coffins "sick-boxes" and their state of being a "malady." They are stuck because they can’t let go of their earthly hangups.
The Actual History Behind the Ghosts
A lot of people think Saunders just made up the idea of Lincoln visiting the tomb. He didn't. History tells us that a grieving, broken Abraham Lincoln actually returned to the crypt multiple times to hold his son’s body. It’s a devastating image. A President, carrying the weight of a fracturing nation, cradling a corpse in the middle of the night.
Saunders stumbled upon this anecdote years before he actually wrote the book. He told the New York Times that the image of Lincoln with the body stayed with him, "like a little ghost in my own mind."
The novel is built on a framework of historical citations. You’ll be reading a chapter and see snippets from real memoirs, newspapers, and letters of the era. Some are real—primary sources from the 1860s—and some are fictionalized by Saunders to fit the narrative flow. It’s a collage. It forces you to sift through "truth" the same way we do in real life, through the biased lenses of different witnesses.
One observer says the moon was full; another says it was a crescent. One says Lincoln was stoic; another says he was weeping uncontrollably. It’s brilliant. It shows how history is just a collection of memories, and memories are notoriously unreliable.
Why the Format Drives People Crazy (At First)
If you open George Saunders Lincoln in the Bardo and expect a standard "Once upon a time" narrative, you’re going to be confused.
The book is written as a series of attributions. It looks like a court transcript or a script for a stage play with hundreds of actors. You get a line of dialogue, then the name of the spirit speaking.
- hans vollman
- roger bevins iii
- the Reverend Everly Thomas
These three serve as our unofficial guides. Vollman is a man who died just before consummating his marriage to a much younger woman (he spends the afterlife with a permanent, giant erection, which is classic Saunders humor). Bevins is a young man who died by suicide and now has dozens of eyes and hands, constantly trying to "see" and "touch" the world he left too soon.
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It’s jarring. You have to learn how to read it. It’s like learning a new language or getting your "sea legs" on a boat. Once you stop fighting the format and just let the voices wash over you, the emotional payoff is massive.
The Bardo as a Mirror of Our Own Denial
The spirits in the cemetery are ridiculous. They’re pathetic. They’re us.
They won't admit they are dead. They think they are just "indisposed." They focus on the trivialities of their past lives—their property, their status, their perceived slights. Saunders uses the bardo to comment on how we spend our living years. We’re so busy being "indisposed" by our own egos that we miss the actual point of being alive.
Willie Lincoln is the catalyst. When his father comes to the tomb and touches him, it sends a shockwave through the graveyard. Spirits aren't supposed to be touched by the living. It reminds them of what they lost. It forces them to look at the "great matter" they’ve been avoiding.
The book asks a heavy question: How do we love, knowing that everything we love will eventually be taken away? Lincoln is grappling with this on a personal level with Willie, and on a national level with the thousands of young men dying in the war.
The Booker Prize and the Critical Shift
When the book won the Man Booker Prize in 2017, it solidified Saunders as more than just a "short story guy." The judges called it "utterly original."
But let’s be real. Not everyone loves it. Some critics found the historical citations tedious. Others thought the "ghost talk" was too whimsical for such a somber subject.
Honestly, that’s why it works. It refuses to be a "prestige" historical novel. It’s not Lincoln directed by Steven Spielberg. It’s weird, gross, and funny. It treats the President not as a marble statue, but as a guy who is profoundly lonely and failing under the pressure of a war he isn't sure he can win.
Key Themes to Look For:
- Impermanence: Everything ends. The bardo is just a waiting room for the inevitable.
- Empathy: The ghosts eventually have to "enter" Lincoln to understand his grief, and in doing so, they find their own humanity again.
- The Weight of History: How the "official" record often misses the internal, messy truth of suffering.
What You Should Do Next
If you haven’t read it yet, don’t just buy the ebook. This is one of the rare cases where the audiobook is actually a different experience entirely.
The George Saunders Lincoln in the Bardo audiobook features a cast of 166 people. We're talking Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, Lena Dunham, and even Saunders’ own family. It’s a literal wall of sound. It captures the "chorus" aspect of the novel in a way that’s hard to replicate on the page.
If you have read it, go back and look at the "historical" chapters again. Try to spot which citations are real and which are fake. Saunders is a trickster. He weaves them together so seamlessly that you’ll find yourself Googling 19th-century diarists only to realize they never existed.
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Practical steps for your next read:
- Don't Google the "Rules": Just read the first 50 pages. The "who is speaking" part becomes second nature quickly.
- Focus on the Reverend: He’s the only one who truly knows what’s coming next, and his fear is the moral center of the book.
- Read the "Citations" Out Loud: The rhythm of the 1860s prose is intentionally contrasted with the frantic energy of the ghosts.
This isn't a book you "finish" and put on a shelf. It’s a book that hangs around. It makes you look at your own "sick-box" a little differently. It reminds you that while we’re all just passing through, the way we treat each other in the waiting room actually matters.
Check out Saunders’ essay collection, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, if you want to understand his technical approach to storytelling. It’s basically a masterclass in how he builds the empathy that makes the Lincoln novel so gut-wrenching. Or, just go sit in an old cemetery for an hour. You’ll get the vibe.