In my free time, I have slowly been making my way through George Saunders’s recent novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. This book makes my head spin; however, it is an abstract masterpiece that I would recommend simply to experience the literary art of the work (which itself challenges the bounds of what we consider to be fictional literature). In February of 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, the Lincoln family suffered the loss of their eleven-year-old son. Following his burial, local newspapers detail the repeated return of President Lincoln to his crypt where, in grief, he sought to hold the body of his child. Inspired by this small truth, Saunders crafts the story of his deceased son, William, as he is stuck within the transition from death to rebirth. In this portrayed realm, the bounds between living and dead, historical fact and imagined reality, are distorted, forcing the confrontation of an enduring question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end? (Adapted from back cover)
Not only is this book extremely experimental in form, the text either excerpts from published articles, pieced together to craft a narrative, or shifting between the thoughts of the other characters contained within the bardo, but also original in content. Within a society that generally censures discussions of death, this work faces it head on, tearing down the borders we have created between ourselves and this unknown.
In reading this book, I have been forced to contend with various questions of mortality, more specifically the significance of our tendency to label this topic as taboo (which is even demonstrated through the euphemisms I habitually use in reference to death throughout this post). In speaking with a friend the other day, we came upon the topic of her late brother, whose death was a tragedy felt throughout our entire community. Despite the love felt for him in his passing, her family has continued to live almost in ignorance of his existence, in turn causing them to be isolated in their unspoken grief. The suffering that they continue to endure leaves me heartbroken. Why must we create barriers between us and those we have lost? Isn’t it better to have loved and lived than to have never existed? Our lives are threads being woven into the tapestry of life. When one’s earthly existence has come to a close, we must not unravel the entire work, but rather treasure our shared experiences and observe the overall beauty of our collective art piece.
I know this is a heavy topic; however, these are simply the thoughts that have recently been filling my mind. The most difficult scene from the book was when Lincoln holds the decaying body of his son, crying and speaking to him, asking him to return to life. In response, William climbs back into his corpse, able to feel the arms of his father once again. This blurring of temporal boundaries spoke to me, demonstrating that, despite the loss of ones physical presence, our lives can be touched by the existence of others, which will be carried throughout all of time. Perhaps this is the ultimate transcendence of borders.
–Jaden
Jaden, amazing piece. I want to read this book now. Your comment about death being a taboo for discussion in today’s society made me think about 2016, when there was a large number of prominent celebrity deaths. I remember that solely because a lot of people were calling 2016 a horrible year (let’s be honest, it was a horrible year for other reasons, but the celebrity deaths were certainly a contribution to the overall assessment of it as a bad year). Which made me worry about the future of death as a topic in our society because the modern concept of the celebrity is a relatively new thing (I feel like it’s only been around since the mid-20th century), and I feel like we’ve just started to get to the point where the first wave of people to really be treated as celebrities, as icons, the way they are today are going to start reaching the end of their lives, and I honestly think it’s not going to stop just because people are always dying; it’s just that we really haven’t had the kind of social media culture to react to it and publicize it in this way until relatively recently. Not to be morbid, but celebrities are going to keep dying, naturally or otherwise, and I wonder how our society is going to handle that going forward. We can’t just keep calling each new year where deaths happen a ‘horrible year,’ because that would get unhealthy eventually. Instead, I think we have to learn to come to terms with deaths in a way that people may have avoided before. Death happens. People can’t hide from it.
Thank you, Jaden, for such a profound and touching post. I think it’s amazing that this book challenged you to think about death in a new light. It is true that death is difficult to talk about because it makes us uncomfortable and upset; however, it is possible for us to view death as an inevitable checkpoint and transcendental experience in one’s life. This post reminds me of the book “When Breath Becomes Air” by Paul Kalanithi because the narrator in that story is able to come to terms with death rather than fear it. He lives his last few months of life focussing on how he can touch other lives to leave an impression, rather than living in a perpetual state of dread. Death does not have to be the end of one’s existence, and I love the idea of living in the present so that you or your actions can be remembered after you are gone.
Wow Jaden, this hit me hard. Sounds like an interesting yet visceral concept. The book would be the perfect text to explore the border between life and death, as well as the borders that separate physical presence from afterlife.
I am sorry to hear about your friend’s brother. It’s difficult to feel the absence of a loved one, but even more difficult to constantly suppress the grief. My brother lost a close friend, and made a part of his presence infinite by getting a tattoo in his honor.
The ideas addressed in “No Death No Fear” reminded me of the law of matter- that it cannot be created nor destroyed. Although someone’s spirit may not be tangible and compact in a human sized space, it can still be felt in the room. Has anyone ever experienced this?
I think part of what makes death so taboo nowadays is that it’s so rare. It’s no longer normal from children to die in childbirth or their first year. We assume they will make it because of advances medicine. It’s easy to believe we’ve conquered death just because we’ve limited its scope. We trick ourselves into believing we’ve removed the border between life and death rather than just pushing it further away.
Thanks for sharing! I’d never considered this idea before- the importance of acknowledging death and the borders that it brings.
Wow Jaden, this sounds like such an interesting novel!! I would love to read it. I don’t think our (American) society has a healthy relationship with death. Our anti-aging-obsessed culture seems to avoid death at all costs, which makes sense (we are living beings and want to continue to live), but leads to isolation and so many other problems. I recently read a book by Thich Nhat Hanh entitled “No Death No Fear” that addresses this omnipresent fear of death… I personally loved this book and if you are interested in this topic I would highly recommend reading it. Hanh writes from the perspective of a monk raised in Vietnam. Essentially, he argues that our lives are just manifestations of our existence, and that after we “pass away,” we do not cease to exist, but rather manifest ourselves in a different form. Like a cloud “dies” when it rains, the water molecules themselves never cease to exist, but rather they manifest themselves differently (in the form of rain, and then a stream, river, ocean, etc). In this way, we can connect with those who have passed in all of our surroundings, and within ourselves.
Beautiful post, Jaden. Like you say, death is tabooed and therefore difficult to write about and your writing respects that while also working to go past it or transcend it…
I like the discussion of talking about borders as literary devices in the book, and how experimenting with different techniques is breaking borders. Thinking back to our discussion at the Ross Commons dinner yesterday about shortening attention span, the rise of poetry, and the shift of literature to digital: which borders are the next to break?
Though I haven’t read the book, I caught snippets over time of my parents listening to the audiobook version, which contains 166 separate voice actors, some celebrities, some Saunders’ family and friends. Saunders calls the effect “a sort of American chorale.” While I didn’t experience the entirety of the narrative, I would conjecture that Saunders’ focus on breadth of narrative says its own part about how he wants his reader to experience the specificity and/or universality of death and our perspectives of it.