The Bardo
What is the bardo, and how does it function in George Saunders’s book? In what way does the bardo apply to those who are living as well as the dead?
The bardo is, in Tibetan Buddhism belief, a state of existence between death and rebirth. In his story, Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders, a Tibetan Buddhist, writes of the bardo in a way which, to me, made it feel more like a state between death and whatever lay beyond death. Which, I suppose, is more or less the same thing.
With the Lincoln in the Bardo title, there is a little ambiguity regarding which Lincoln is in the bardo. Most technically, it is Willie Lincoln, who died as a boy, and, in Saunders’s book, finds himself in the ghost-like state of the bardo.
But, in a way, the bardo applies some to his father Abraham Lincoln as well. In a loose conceptual, less to-the-definition sense, bardo is an in-between state. Lincoln, while not physically in the bardo, while visiting his recently deceased son’s coffin, does keep having flashback memories of Willie alive.
Lincoln is, then, in a sort of bardo — stuck in that difficult place between not understanding and understanding, believing, grasping, that his young son is dead. The president is in some denial, or maybe that’s not the word exactly, but some disbelief that Willie is gone.
Willie, as mentioned earlier, is very much in the bardo, in its technical sense, stuck between death and what comes thereafter. The young Lincoln seems purely confused by his location, thinking that his father is coming to visit him.
It seems Willie, or rather ghost-Willie, I suppose, is stuck in the bardo because of an innocent lack of understanding, which he eventually gets, that he is, in fact, dead. Whereas it seems all the other ghosts he encounters in this place are there because of a more ardent denial that they are deceased, a belief that they are merely sick and can one day return to the alive state, the world.
When listening to Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, it took a bit of time to get into this story, but I eventually found myself enthralled by its telling. I mention this enjoyment because I would be pretty interested in a sequel to the book, set a few years later when Lincoln died — Abe Lincoln in the bardo, trying to find his son, some eventual reunion content, perhaps, beyond the bardo.
