Lincoln in the Bardo

Lincoln in the Bardo is a work of historical fiction that imagines a night in Abraham Lincoln’s life. At the same time, the novel is also fantasy, set in an afterlife where the ghosts of a cemetery interact with each other and even with the living. However, despite these flights of the supernatural, Saunders anchors his story in the realities of the country’s founding. The bardo is just as tribalist, classist, and racist as the material world: Educated spirits disdain their uncouth neighbors, upper-class men feel free to harass everyone, and most significantly, white ghosts attack and denigrate the Black spirits who exist on the cemetery’s outskirts—literally marginalized in death as they were in life. The universality of death has not erased divisions. Instead, afraid of moving on to the unknown that lies beyond the matterlightblooming phenomenon, the spirits hang on to their prejudices, eager to feel power over another.

The moral crux of the bardo is letting go of one’s individual history: Roger comes to terms with his suicide, Hans makes amends for abandoning Elise, Jane Ellis makes peace with her inability to be with her daughters, and Litzie regains her voice after becoming selectively mute from her trauma. This kind of personal reckoning is crucial to moving on; obsessively holding on to the past is a trap. Embracing the liberation of matterlightblooming means living in the moment with gratitude for one’s mundane surroundings.

But this kind of personal letting go doesn’t work for history on a grand scale, as we quickly see as soon as the novel’s Black spirits enter the narrative. Elson refuses to leave the bardo until he has gotten vengeance on his enslavers. In the meantime, he enters a permanent battle with Lieutenant Stone, an inveterate and unrepentant racist. This endless conflict dooms Elson to the cemetery for good, but his morally upright stance makes it clear that we cannot blame him for not simply letting go the way other spirits must. His grievance isn’t personal but historical, so simply accepting it cannot be the solution. Similarly, the ghost of Thomas Havens elects to forgo the peace that follows matterlightblooming; instead, he leaves the cemetery alongside Abraham Lincoln, merging his consciousness with the president’s to push this great leader into giving Black people the opportunity to be free to demonstrate their capabilities. Historical wrongs require the same kind of obsessive work—generations of it—that the novel otherwise paints as meaningless.