Lincoln in the Bardo
Lincoln in the Bardo
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
Quizzes
NEWReading Tools
George Saunders on Lincoln in the Bardo
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
Twenty years of carrying a single imageThe book began with a sentence spoken by a stranger on a Washington DC walk: that Lincoln had returned, on several occasions, to the crypt where his son Willie was interred during the Civil War. Saunders held that image for roughly two decades before he committed to prose, and the reason for the delay was precisely the weight of the subject. When he finally sat down in 2012, he framed the cost of not trying in terms so vivid that the gravestone metaphor became the most-quoted line of the book’s entire promotional run.
I carried that image around for the next 20-odd years, too scared to try something that seemed so profound, and then finally, in 2012, noticing that I wasn’t getting any younger, not wanting to be the guy whose own gravestone would read ‘Afraid to Embark on Scary Artistic Project He Desperately Longed to Attempt’, decided to take a run at it.
The fear was not only existential; it was professional. Saunders had spent years writing in stolen hours around a day job, and his first book appeared when he was thirty-eight. He had carved out a mode — darkly comic, satirical — that was entirely his own, and a historical novel about a grieving president felt like betting that hard-won identity against an unfamiliar form. He described the bind in the New York Times podcast interview.
My first book came out when I was 38. And just barely. I felt like I just finally after all that time of working, figured out something I could do that might have some appeal. So in that mindset, you’re a little bit reluctant to give it up. [paraphrased from audio]
The cliché problem sat on top of the career problem. Lincoln appears on pennies, in car commercials, in films where he hunts vampires. Saunders found that the very thickness of the cliché became generative: each corny version of Lincoln he wanted to avoid pushed him toward something stranger and more honest.
The operative question of the book became, ‘Good Lord, how do you write about Lincoln without being imitative/mawkish/quaint?’ Eventually, the dangers of writing about Lincoln became guard rails, sort of, or originality stimulants. My desire to steer clear of the corny and sentimental became a way to steer toward doing something new.
How he wrote it
Yurts assembled into a mansionThe narration problem arrived the moment Saunders moved from the initial image to actual prose. Lincoln alone in a graveyard at night has no natural observer. He tried Lincoln’s own voice and found parody lurking; he tried omniscient third person and felt nothing. The solution came from a suggestion by former student Adam Levin, who had once told him that any novel Saunders wrote should take the form of monologues. The idea had stayed dormant until the Lincoln material needed it. In the Granta interview, Saunders recalled the instant the two things connected.
As soon as he said that, I thought, oh yeah, I could do that. [paraphrased from audio]
That recognition unlocked the ghost-chorus structure: dozens of voices, each narrating from their own stuck position in the bardo, the transitional state between death and rebirth drawn from Tibetan Buddhist tradition. The form gave him permission to be theatrical without writing a play.
Once the ghost voices were working, Saunders found the supernatural freedom of the space created a different problem: when anything can happen, nothing carries weight. The Civil War context that had driven his interest was absent from the draft. He needed historical grounding, and the solution arrived as an argument with himself, which he recounted for Writer’s Digest.
‘OK, how do you know that history?’ ‘Well, I read it in all those history books.’ ‘Well, why not just put it in there verbatim?’ Then there was an awkward silence and I’m like, ‘Can I do that?’ And the other me said, ‘Well, it’s your stupid book, you can do whatever you like.’
He began sampling real historical texts directly into the narrative, then started inventing sources to fill gaps. The invented passages immediately looked different from the real ones, and the reason was a discipline problem he had not anticipated. In the Interview magazine conversation with Zadie Smith, he described what his own invented prose was doing wrong and how he corrected it.
My parts were so show-offy at first. They stood out because they were so flamboyant. So I had to go in and do the work of toning them down in order to make them fit. It’s like if you’re an actor and you’re always overacting, well, you’re a bad actor. But if you’re an actor who subdues yourself to the extent that’s necessary, then you’re really acting.
The form that emerged from this process was not designed in advance. Saunders spent months discarding anything boring or predictable and eventually looked up to find the architecture had assembled itself from the techniques he had used for decades writing short fiction. The yurt-to-mansion metaphor, which he returned to repeatedly on the 2017 tour, described both the surprise and the logic of that discovery.
It was as if I’d spent my life designing custom yurts and then got a commission to build a mansion. At first I thought ‘Not sure I can do that.’ But then it occurred to me that a mansion of sorts might be constructed from a series of connected yurts – each small unit built by the usual rules of construction, their interconnection creating new opportunities for beauty.
The personal thread
A Post-it note, and a shed near OneontaAbout a third of the way through, Saunders read what he had and lost confidence in the entire project. He gave the draft to his wife, Paula. Her response came on a Post-it note, and it was apparently sufficient to restart the book entirely. At the Booker Prize acceptance speech, he referred to that note without revealing its contents.
something so generous that it will stay a secret forever [paraphrased from audio]
The detail matters not as anecdote but as evidence of where the book nearly stopped. Everything after that Post-it note, including the last third written alone in a shed near Oneonta, New York, at twelve to fourteen hours a day, was built on the confidence that note restored.
The final stretch of writing, done in sustained isolation, felt qualitatively different from the earlier phases of construction and doubt. Saunders described the experience in the New York Times podcast in terms that inverted the usual image of a novelist grinding through a difficult project.
the book was just like surrendering itself to me... Those bowling pins were just raining down. [paraphrased from audio]
On what the book is wrestling with
What sorrow does to a personSaunders followed Lincoln through years of primary and secondary research, and what he found was not the monument but a man accumulating loss at a rate that would have destroyed most people. The research revealed something specific about the relationship between suffering and honesty that became the emotional spine of the novel.
He had this incredible heaping up of sorrow. You know, the war was going badly, he was responsible for all these deaths, his own son died, he was kind of hated in his time. But somehow that sorrow made him more honest. You know how sometimes in your life when everything is going wrong, you don’t, you can’t hold on to any of your pretext about who you are. And that can sometimes make a real honesty. [paraphrased from audio]
That arc of honesty-through-suffering led Saunders to a specific verdict about Lincoln’s character, one that goes beyond the historical record into something closer to a spiritual assessment. The Paste magazine interview captured how far he was willing to go.
I think he was actually a very advanced spiritual being, however you want to define that. If you look at his learning curve those last four years, it was almost straight up. He became such a deep soul.
The novel’s ghost characters, each of them stuck in the bardo because they cannot release their attachment to the life they left behind, mirror Lincoln’s dilemma in the crypt with his son’s body. Saunders came to understand grief and love not as sequential emotions but as a single experience, and that realization solved both a thematic and a technical problem: it gave him a route from his own emotional life directly into Lincoln’s. He described the move in the New York Times podcast.
the book was about grief, but then I thought actually grief and love are the same exact thing. So if I represent love I felt for my kids, my wife, for everybody, and you put that love into Lincoln’s mouth or his heart, and you know that his son has died, it instantly becomes grief. [paraphrased from audio]
What he wants us to sit with
Love in a world that takes everything backBeneath the ghost story and the historical scaffolding, Saunders identified a single question that he believed the book was actually asking: not how we grieve, but how we are supposed to love at all inside a world that guarantees loss. He articulated it most directly in the Service95 conversation with Dua Lipa.
how are we supposed to live in a world that seems to want us to love one another and find certain people, precious and beloved, and yet it’s a completely conditional world in which everything ultimately disappears. [paraphrased from audio]
The book was published in February 2017, weeks after Trump’s inauguration, and Saunders refused to pretend that timing was irrelevant. At the Booker Prize ceremony in October of that year, he used the acceptance speech to articulate the question the novel puts to the political moment, framing it as a choice that every generation faces and that Lincoln’s story enacts.
Do we respond to fear with exclusion and negative projection and violence, or do we take that ancient great leap of faith and do our best to respond with love? And with faith in the idea that what seems other is actually not other at all, but just us on a different day. [paraphrased from audio]