Of all the remarkable elements of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, perhaps the most audacious is its central conceit: a novel about Abraham Lincoln that is not primarily about Abraham Lincoln. Instead, it is a chorus of the dead, a cacophony of voices from the "bardo"—a Tibetan Buddhist term for an intermediate state of existence between death and rebirth. Because of that, the characters are not historical figures in the traditional sense but spectral, often contradictory, and deeply human presences who populate a graveyard in Georgetown, Washington D. C., on the night of February 22, 1862.
The novel’s structure is its greatest character. Which means saunders constructs a narrative from a patchwork of historical documents, letters, and newspaper clippings, which are then interwoven with the direct speech of the ghosts. But this creates a unique dramatic form where the "characters" are not just individuals but a collective consciousness, a swirling vortex of grief, memory, and unfinished business. To understand the novel, one must understand its key spectral inhabitants and their roles in the tragic event at its core: the death of Willie Lincoln, the president's eleven-year-old son.
The Central Tragedy: Willie Lincoln
While Willie Lincoln is the catalyst for the entire drama, he is himself a character of profound passivity. His ghost is not a speaking part in the traditional sense. Instead, he is a presence, a small, vulnerable figure trapped in the bardo, confused and frightened. His role is that of the innocent victim, the child whose life was cut short, and whose spirit is the focal point for the grief of both his father and the graveyard's inhabitants. Willie’s inability to speak or act makes him a silent mirror, reflecting the desperation and love of those around him. He is the still point around which the chaotic dance of the other spirits revolves Most people skip this — try not to. Surprisingly effective..
The Guides and the Skeptics: A Fractured Chorus
The ghosts are not a monolith. They are divided into factions, each with their own philosophy about the bardo and their place within it.
-
The Reverend Everly: A former preacher who now wanders the graveyard, Everly represents the dogmatic, fearful aspect of religion. He is obsessed with sin, damnation, and the strict rules of the afterlife. He views Willie’s presence as a violation of the natural order and is a vocal opponent of any attempt to save the boy. For Everly, the bardo is a place of punishment, and he clings to his own perceived righteousness as a shield against the chaos.
-
Hans Vollman: A young, recently deceased Union soldier, Vollman is the novel's most passionate advocate for action. He is driven by a powerful, almost overwhelming sense of duty and love. He believes that Willie can be saved, that his soul can be "pulled" from the bardo back into his body through the sheer force of collective will and love. Vollman is the engine of the plot, the one who rallies the others and proposes the radical plan to possess Willie's body. His character embodies the idea that love can conquer even death Not complicated — just consistent..
-
Roger Bevins III: A former lawyer, Bevins is the pragmatist and the skeptic of the group. He is initially drawn to Vollman's plan but is constantly aware of the risks and the absurdity of their situation. Bevins provides a voice of reason, questioning the motives of others and highlighting the potential for disaster. He is less concerned with metaphysical salvation than with the practical consequences of their actions. His character represents the rational mind struggling against the irrational forces of grief and the supernatural Simple, but easy to overlook. And it works..
-
The Bardo's Established Order: Mr. and Mrs. Cuthbert: The Cuthberts are long-term residents of the graveyard, having died decades earlier. They represent the inertia of the bardo. They are content, or at least resigned, to their state of limbo. They see the newer ghosts, like Willie and Vollman, as disruptive and naive. Mrs. Cuthbert, in particular, is a voice of weary wisdom, having witnessed countless souls pass through. They are the establishment of the afterlife, opposed to the chaos that Willie's presence and Vollman's plan threaten to unleash.
The Historical Figures: Lincoln and the Narrator
The most complex characters are those who straddle the world of the living and the dead.
-
Abraham Lincoln: Lincoln is not a ghost in the bardo. He is a living man, but his grief is so immense that it bleeds into the spectral realm. He visits the crypt to mourn his son, and his presence is a gravitational force that affects the entire graveyard. Saunders portrays Lincoln not as a mythic figure but as a broken, grieving father. His conversations with Willie's body are raw and desperate. He is the novel's emotional anchor, and his love for his son is the ultimate force that the ghosts seek to harness. Lincoln’s character is defined by his sorrow, and his journey through the night is one of confronting the limits of his own power—both as a president and as a father.
-
The Narrator(s): The novel’s most unique narrative device is the use of "we" for the collective voice of the ghosts and "I" for the direct speech of individual characters. This "we" is not a unified entity but a shifting, argumentative, and often comical chorus. It represents the collective unconscious of the graveyard, a voice that is part observer, part participant, and always uncertain. This narrative voice is itself a character, embodying the confusion, hope, and fear of the dead.
The Thematic Resonance of the Characters
The characters in Lincoln in the Bardo are not just spectral figures; they are metaphors for the human condition. Each ghost represents a different way of dealing with loss, mortality, and the past.
- Everly represents dogma and fear.
- Vollman represents passionate, desperate hope.
- Bevins represents rational skepticism.
- The Cuthberts represent resignation and inertia.
- Willie represents innocent loss.
- Lincoln represents the burden of grief in the world of the living.
The novel’s climax, where the ghosts attempt to possess Willie’s body, is a disaster. So naturally, it is a powerful, terrifying scene that underscores the novel’s central theme: that some boundaries cannot be crossed, and that the process of grief, while agonizing, is necessary. The characters’ failure is not a failure of love but a testament to the fact that death is a finality that even the most profound love cannot overcome. In the end, Willie’s spirit moves on, and Lincoln is left to bury his son a second time, this time with a clearer, sadder understanding.
So, to summarize, the characters of Lincoln in the Bardo are a masterful creation. That's why saunders uses them to build a rich, complex, and deeply moving exploration of grief, history, and the afterlife. In real terms, by giving voice to the dead, he illuminates the experiences of the living, creating a novel that is as much about how we remember and mourn as it is about the Civil War era itself. The characters are not historical relics but timeless archetypes, making this one of the most uniquely character-driven novels of the twenty-first century Easy to understand, harder to ignore..
Formal Innovation: The Collage of History and Voice
Beyond its character work, Lincoln in the Bardo distinguishes itself through a radical formal architecture that mirrors its thematic preoccupations. Saunders constructs the novel not merely as a narrative but as a collage, interweaving the ghosts’ theatrical monologues with fragments of historical record—some real, some invented. These snippets, drawn from memoirs, newspapers, and scholarly works of the era, create a cacophony of authoritative voices that frequently contradict one another regarding the weather on the night of Willie’s death, the appearance of the moon, or the President’s demeanor. This deliberate fragmentation serves a dual purpose: it democratizes history, suggesting that the "official" record is no more stable than the memories of the dead, and it forces the reader to inhabit the same epistemological uncertainty as the ghosts. Just as Vollman and Bevins cannot agree on the nature of their "sick-forms," the historical sources cannot agree on the facts of the night. The novel’s screenplay-like formatting—dialogue attributed to character names in bold, stage directions describing the grotesque physical manifestations of the spirits’ obsessions—further collapses the distance between the reader and the bardo, transforming the act of reading into a kind of séance where we, too, are summoned to witness and adjudicate Surprisingly effective..
The Political Dimension: Grief as Democratic Practice
This formal strategy extends into the novel’s profound, albeit subtle, political philosophy. Lincoln’s private agony in the crypt becomes a crucible for his public evolution. As he communes with the dead—specifically when he opens himself to the "multitude" of voices within the graveyard, including the enslaved dead like Thomas Havens and the quarreling Union and Confederate soldiers—he practices a radical form of empathy that prefigures the "malice toward none, with charity for all" of his Second Inaugural Address. The bardo, in Saunders’s vision, is the ultimate democracy: a space where rank, race, and ideology are stripped away, leaving only the raw, universal currency of regret and longing. Lincoln’s ability to "enter into" the suffering of others, to temporarily shed the carapace of the Presidency and become simply a grieving father among millions, is presented as the wellspring of his moral leadership. The novel argues that true governance arises not from certainty or dogma (embodied by the rigid, judgmental Reverend Everly Thomas), but from the terrifying, humbling willingness to dwell in the "mud" of shared humanity. The ghosts’ final, chaotic rush into Willie—and subsequently into Lincoln—is a violent, ecstatic metaphor for the body politic: a messy, painful, necessary merging of selves Worth keeping that in mind. Less friction, more output..
The Ethics of Letting Go
In the long run, the novel’s power resides in its refusal to offer easy transcendence. The bardo is not a waiting room for heaven; it is a state of attachment. The "matterlightblooming phenomenon" that signals a spirit’s departure is not a reward for virtue but a consequence of acceptance—a letting go of the "former life" that the ghosts have curated like hoarded treasure
and its attendant pain. Which means for the ghosts, this acceptance is a profound ethical act, a recognition that the self is not a fortress to be defended but a permeable membrane through which love and loss flow. Lincoln’s journey, therefore, is not toward a state of peace achieved by forgetting Willie, but toward a state of integrated grief. By absorbing the multitudes of the dead, he does not erase his son’s memory; he expands his own soul to contain it, transforming private sorrow into a collective, and ultimately public, act of healing. The "matterlightblooming" that finally liberates the spirits is mirrored in Lincoln’s own evolution, as he returns to the world not with answers, but with a deeper, more compassionate understanding of the human condition, forged in the crucible of the bardo But it adds up..
Conclusion: The Bardo as a Model for Being
In Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders constructs a theology of uncertainty that is as formally innovative as it is emotionally resonant. By rejecting a linear, monologic narrative in favor of a polyphonic, screenplay-like structure, the novel forces its readers into the same disorienting, empathetic space that Lincoln inhabits. The bardo becomes a powerful metaphor for the act of living itself: a constant negotiation between the voices of the past and the demands of the present, a struggle to hold contradictions without collapsing into dogma. That's why the novel’s central argument—that true moral and political strength is born not from certainty, but from the courageous willingness to engage with the full, messy spectrum of human experience—offers a profound antidote to the polarized discourses of our time. At the end of the day, Saunders suggests that the work of grief, like the work of democracy, is never finished. It is an ongoing, collective practice of listening, of letting go, and of allowing ourselves to be haunted, transformed, and ultimately, set free Which is the point..
You'll probably want to bookmark this section.
