He says that as he wrote, he kept forcing himself to ask, “Why is this material too earnest for you?”īut there is nothing wrong with earnestness in and of itself.
Saunders himself struggled with that attitude, he said in an interview, and he found it disturbing. Some critics have suggested that it is too sentimental, especially for this historical moment. Saunders is known for his gleamingly sharp satire, and while his distinctive voice and sense of humor is very evident in this book, “save the innocent child’s soul” might feel like an uncharacteristically sentimental conceit. This conceit might seem uncharacteristically earnest for a satirist like Saunders. And prompted by Lincoln’s empathy, and his ability to treat the dead with respect and affection, they resolve to save Willie’s soul and convince him to pass on to the afterlife. It proves to them that “we were perhaps not so unlovable as we had come to believe,” says Roger Bevins III. After that, he feels compelled to stay, so that he can see his father again.īut for the rest of the ghosts, Lincoln’s visit - the act of cradling his son’s body like a Pietà - is profoundly moving. Willie is perfectly prepared to move on from the Bardo, until his father visits and holds him. When they stay in the Bardo, the results are catastrophic: They deteriorate, mentally and physically, and become entrapped by a carapace of demonic souls that slowly drives them mad. Everyone knows he is supposed to pass on rapidly to the next phase of being, as children generally do. Roger Bevins III, a closeted gay man who manifests as a many-limbed body covered with extra eyes and noses and mouths and ears, with slashes on every wrist, must experience all the sensual pleasures of the world, which he only realized existed while he was committing suicide.īut young Willie, freshly interred, is not burdened with the regrets and second guesses of an adult life. Hans Vollman, who manifests as a naked man with a dent in his skull and an enormous erection, must finally and at last consummate his marriage with his young wife, as he was planning to do before a beam hit him on the head in a freak accident. For their health, they claim, they have been confined to sick-boxes (coffins) and must lie next to sick-forms (corpses), but they are certain they will eventually recover and go back to “that other place” to rejoin their loved ones.Īfter all, they have things to do.
There are 166 of them narrating the book by turns, and few of them are willing to admit they are dead. The ghosts are all residents of the Bardo, the in-between space of Tibetan Buddhism: post-life, pre-afterlife. Lincoln in the Bardo takes place after death, but before the afterlife This sweet-natured longform work is a new direction for Saunders, the satirical short-story writer - but it’s a fruitful one. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark
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