This book may contain language, sexual content, and themes of grief and loss, which may be challenging for some readers. Reader caution advised.
After the Bardo
by Chris Hudson
Hi, my name is Chris Hudson and I’m an English professor at Amarillo College. I will begin my final Radio Readers BookByte on Lincoln in the Bardo by promising (with fingers crossed) not to spoil the rather thrilling and suspenseful ending.
By this point in the novel the fragmented stories, short chapters, and rapid dialogue should be making sense as they race toward an explosive conclusion. We know Willie Lincoln’s soul is threatened by those demonic tendrils. Though our characters try hard to pull the tendrils away, they begin to lose the war.
At the same time many of the residents are crowding around Willie’s tomb, desperately telling him their stories. Why? Because they see the continued presence and the astounding (and possibly historically true) action of his father removing him from his coffin and cradling his son a last time as a sign of hope. If this person from the “previous place,” as they call it, can cross the threshold between the worlds, then maybe Willie can too and can take their messages back with him.
But let me step back from the edge of a spoiler and return to the Reverend Everly Thomas. Part of the Reverend’s story (and the part he must keep secret from the others) is that he knows he is dead. When he died, he crossed quickly through the bardo and followed a path with two other spirits to a diamond palace. His two fellow travelers approach angelic beings and are in turn judged in a process involving mirrors and scales. The first fares well and enters the blazing light of a heaven; the second is thrust into a graphically described hell. When the Reverend’s turn arrives, he is at first confident, since he is a man of God; however, as he sees the angels start to turn against him, he flees. As he runs, he is told to never say what he saw there, or his next visit would be even more terrible. So, he returns to the bardo.
In the final chapters, the Reverend is left alone with Willie, fighting off the tendrils. The Reverend heroically tears Willie and runs with him toward a place he knows is safe, the chapel. There, Willie is able to enter his father a final time, and what he learns leads to a series of epiphanies that strike almost all the characters. The matterlightblooming phenomenon explodes across the bardo.
But what happened to the Reverend? Saunders notes on his Substack that the question he gets asked the most about Lincoln in the Bardo is: “Did the Reverend go to Heaven, the second time he tried?”
He answers: quote “I always make a detailed argument that the text and our expectation for efficiency argue that yes, likely he did; otherwise, why would ‘the author’ have narrated his attempted rescue of Willie if it was inconsequential?” “Likely.” That “likely” saves me from another spoiler.
Saunders goes on and provides a chapter he says he had totally forgotten he’d written, and recalls, “Oh, right, you had this big argument with yourself and decided that it would be more graceful to omit it.”
In the omitted chapter, the Reverend again finds himself at the diamond palace. But there are no angels, no mirrors, no scales. His last words are: “There was just light, so much light, and a feeling that, if I wanted to come in, I could.”
I hope you will or did enjoy the endings that reveal many of our characters’ final thoughts and actions. And we can argue with ourselves and with Saunders about whether it is more graceful to omit those final words of the Reverend Everly Thomas, but I find them a rather graceful way to end, for now, this discussion of Lincoln in the Bardo.
For HPPR’s Radio Readers Book Club, I’m Chris Hudson. Thanks for listening!
