Intersection of the Personal and the Collective in George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo

Abstract

This paper examines how George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo reconstructs historical memory through factual accounts and fictional inventions to illustrate the intermingling of Lincoln’s private grief and collective suffering, demonstrating how the personal becomes inseparable from the public, and vice versa. The loss that the country as a whole and Lincoln as an individual suffered was traumatic, immense, and long-lasting. The novelisation of the critical phase of the President’s life during the American Civil War, when he was shattered by the death of his beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, and the pressing need for his leadership to steer a nation devastated by the war, explores emotional and psychological dimensions of trauma more deeply. The multiple conflicting historical accounts collectively enrich the reconstruction of the historical past. Drawing on the postmodern techniques of fragmented and polyphonic narrative, along with historiographic metafiction, the paper investigates how the novel foregrounds multiple perspectives that intersect between the real and the imaginary. Ultimately, the paper argues that this formal fragmentation mirrors the fractured nature of both personal mourning and national crisis.