Lincoln in the Bardo Study Guide

George Saunders was born in 1958 in Amarillo, Texas, but he grew up in Chicago. When he was eighteen, he attended the Colorado School of Mines, where he graduated with a geophysical engineering degree in 1981. Upon graduation, he worked as a field geophysicist in the oil-fields of Sumatra, an island in Southeast Asia. Perhaps because the closest town was only accessible by helicopter, Saunders started reading voraciously while working in the oil-fields. A year and a half later, he got sick after swimming in a feces-contaminated river, so he returned to the United States. During this time, he worked a number of hourly jobs before attending Syracuse University, where he earned his Master’s in Creative Writing. While studying at Syracuse, he met Paula Redick, one of his peers in the writing program. Three weeks later, they were engaged to be married. Within three years of their marriage, the couple had two daughters, and Saunders took a job as a technical writer. At this point he began writing books, eventually publishing his first short story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. Known primarily as a master of short fiction, Saunders also writes travel and profile pieces for well-known outlets like The New Yorker and GQ. In 2017, his long-awaited debut novel was published and won him the Man Booker Prize. He has also won Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships, as well as the PEN/Hemingway Award. He currently teaches at Syracuse University’s Creative Writing Program.

Lincoln in the Bardo takes place in February 1862, when President Abraham Lincoln’s third son, William Wallace Lincoln, died of what historians suspect was typhoid. As the president and first lady grieved over their loss, the Civil War was only nearing the end of its first year, meaning that the nation was just beginning to fully grasp the magnitude of the conflict. Indeed, the war would last for another three years, totaling roughly 620,000 deaths (and perhaps even upwards of 750,000, as it’s difficult to estimate the death toll of a war fought before modern recordkeeping). Nearly a year after William’s death, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the nation’s slaves. This is of historical significance to Lincoln in the Bardo, since the novel ends with the soul of a former slave entering Lincoln’s body and traveling back to the White House with him—an image that alludes to Lincoln’s resolve to end slavery.

Lincoln in the Bardo borrows the term “Bardo” from The Bardo Thodol, a Tibetan text more widely known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Tibetan Buddhists use the word “Bardo” to refer to any transitional period, including life itself, since life is simply a transitional state that takes place after a person’s birth and before their death. Written in the fourteenth century, The Bardo Thodol is supposed to guide souls through the bardo that exists between death and either reincarnation or the attainment of nirvana. In addition, Lincoln in the Bardo sometimes resembles Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, since Saunders’s deceased characters deliver long monologues reminiscent of the self-interested speeches uttered by condemned sinners in The Inferno. Taken together, these two texts inform Saunders’ look at the afterlife, combining these Eastern and Western theological writings with a comedic look at spirituality.