Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Published 2017 · 369 pages · 60,164 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

How hard is Lincoln in the Bardo to read?

Lincoln in the Bardo scores 59 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
Saunders creates distinctive voices for dozens of ghosts, each with period-appropriate vocabulary ranging from formal nineteenth-century prose to crude vernacular. Historical documents add another layer of language. The variety is deliberate and expressive.
Sentence structure: 65 out of 100
The novel is constructed from short passages—some just a line or two—attributed to different speakers. This fragmentary form creates its own syntax, building meaning through accumulation and juxtaposition. Reading it requires adjustment.
Abstraction: 68 out of 100
The bardo ghosts philosophize constantly about their conditions, creating explicit discussions of death, attachment, and letting go. But Saunders grounds these abstractions in the ghosts' particular obsessions and the Lincolns' specific grief.
Information density: 57 out of 100
Saunders packs the novel with historical research presented as quoted documents, ghostly testimonies, and competing accounts of the same events. The density is part of the experience—truth emerges from contradictions.
Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
The story of Willie Lincoln's death and his father's grief emerges through the ghosts' observations and historical fragments. Saunders never enters Lincoln's consciousness directly. You construct the emotional center from indirect evidence.
Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
The bardo itself becomes a symbol of American history—the unfinished business, the unwillingness to let go. Saunders develops this through the ghosts' stories, each carrying its own symbolic weight.
Ironic distance: 30 out of 100
Saunders views his ghosts with complex affection, finding comedy in their self-deceptions while honoring their suffering. The historical documents add ironic counterpoint, showing how official accounts differ from private experience.
Resolution withholding: 35 out of 100
The novel moves toward Willie's release from the bardo and Lincoln's return to the war. Saunders provides this narrative closure while leaving questions about grief, duty, and the afterlife productively open.
Structural complexity: 47 out of 100
The form itself is radically unconventional—a novel constructed from short attributed passages, alternating between ghost voices and historical citations. This structure is the book's most demanding feature.

How Lincoln in the Bardo is regarded

Lincoln in the Bardo holds a literary regard score of 67 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

What Lincoln in the Bardo asks you to hold together

Lincoln in the Bardo sustains Formal (11) on the Model of Hierarchical Complexity: a line between variables. It peaks at Systematic (12), a constellation on pages 322–326. Read from the full text, all 119 passages. What the stages mean.

Where Lincoln in the Bardo sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (119 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Lincoln in the Bardo scores 84 out of 100. A second mythos, tragedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.3. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic (returning toward Myth)
Mr. Collier (shirt clay-stained at the chest from his fall, nose crushed nearly flat) was constantly compelled to float horizontally, like a human compass needle, the top of his head facing in the direction of whichever of his properties he found himself most worried about at the moment.
Symbol: Anagogic (with Formal/historical texture)
These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought them forth.
Mythos: Irony and Satire, phase 6 (visio malefica) tending toward Tragedy (irony vi)
The tent was no longer of silk but flesh (speckled and pink with spoiled blood); the feast was not a feast, but, rather, on long tables inside, numerous human forms were stretched out, in various stages of flaying
Genre: Anatomy + Novel + Romance
Wartime Washington: The Civil War Letters of Isabelle Perkins,” compiled and edited by Nash Perkins III, entry of February 25, 1862.

Where the story of Lincoln in the Bardo takes place

  • Washington, February 1862, the main setting
  • Oak Hill Cemetery, Georgetown, and the White House, February 1862
  • The bardo (the cemetery's night-realm of the dead)

5 things that are true of Lincoln in the Bardo, with the passage for each

  1. The novel opens with Hans Vollman recounting his wedding night, in which he did not consummate the marriage because his young bride was afraid.

    On our wedding day I was forty-six, she was eighteen.

  2. The ghosts call the coffins 'sick-boxes' and refer to their death as being ill.

    A sort of sick-box was judged—was judged to be—

  3. The text includes invented and real period sources cited as 'op. cit.' passages, including conflicting accounts of the moon on the night of the party.

    There was no moon that night and the sky was heavy with clouds.

  4. Lincoln visited the crypt the night of the funeral and lifted Willie's body from his coffin in his arms.

    The man bent, lifted the tiny form from the box, and, with surprising grace for one so ill-made, sat all at once on the floor, gathering it into his lap.

  5. The dead are unable to say they are dead; when Willie finally says it, ghosts vanish with a blast of light.

    Dead, the boy said. Everyone, we are dead!

Scenes in Lincoln in the Bardo that Frye would name

34 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anagnorisis, XCI
Dead, the boy said. Everyone, we are dead! Willie's recognition of death pivots the book and releases the ghosts.
Anatomy, II-IV
Willie was so delighted with a little pony, that he insisted on riding it every day. Interleaved cited sources, real and fabricated, form the book's anatomy-style catalogue of voices.
Pathos, XVII
My poor boy, he was too good for this earth. God has called him home. Willie's death scene, the sacrificial child's pathos, is told through witnesses.
Sparagmos, LXI
numerous human forms were stretched out, in various stages of flaying The Reverend's vision of the judgment hall turns into a flaying table: sparagmos as demonic epiphany.
Demonic imagery, LXI
the host was no king, no Christ, but a beast, bloody-handed and long-fanged, wearing a sulfur-colored robe, bits of innards speckling it. The inversion of the feast into the beast's flaying hall is classic demonic imagery.
Anatomy, V
There was no moon that night and the sky was heavy with clouds. The accounts of the moon contradict one another, an encyclopedic catalogue exposing the instability of evidence.

Books that share these scenes with Lincoln in the Bardo

About the author

George Saunders

Simon's essay on this book