This book may contain language, sexual content, and themes of grief and loss, which may be challenging for some readers. Reader caution advised.
The Case of the Disappearing Narrator
by Marjory Hall
Greetings from Goodwell, Oklahoma! I’m Marjory Hall with a BookByte for our new 2025 Fall Read. In an earlier Book Byte, I mentioned how much avid readers appreciate an author’s fresh approach to a novel. I want to talk about an unusual element in Lincoln in the Bardo: how artfully George Saunders conceals his own voice. One of the most important decisions made by a writer is the voice in which he addresses his readers. The identity and perspective of a narrator in relation to the people and events of the story is fundamental to the reader’s perception of a text, and most of that influence occurs behind the curtain, so to speak.
A narrator can lead a reader to like or dislike a character, to believe or disbelieve a story. A well-crafted narrative voice guides the reader in his whole understanding and response to the events that form the plot. Some authors have created narrators who are completely unreliable. Think of the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Telltale Heart” or “The Cask of Amontillado.” Those narrators reveal themselves to be out of touch with reality, and the reader must experience the story through that off-balance lens, applying his own rationality to the text to find the truth contained in the subtext. What happens, though, when a narrator like Saunders declines to provide his reader the benefit of his guidance? The reader is left to sort out the various elements of the story on his own, but what confirmation can the reader of such a text expect? None. The result is a novel in which the reader becomes, to some extent, a participant in the story, reliant upon each plot point to find his footing.
In Lincoln in the Bardo, the exposition, the setting of the scene, is accomplished by means of quotations from news stories, speeches, and first-hand accounts of events in the United States early in 1862. Those statements reflect all the bias felt by many Americans toward Abraham Lincoln. During his life, Lincoln was not a popular president. News stories of the time reflect the animosity of his political rivals, those people whose agricultural fortunes would be destroyed by emancipation of the work force, and many who, though abolitionist in principle, were adamantly opposed to freeing people of color into what they thought of as “their” society. President Lincoln never gets to speak for himself, and there is no kindly narrator to explain why the Lincolns did not cancel their gathering the night Willie was ill or the isolation Lincoln experienced in his public and private lives.
The first-person speakers in the book are residents of the Bardo. They are in the midst of transitioning from one state of being to another, and they have no knowledge or perspective on what is happening in the world of the living. There is no unified voice from the Bardo because of the various manners and times in which each character died physically as well as all their unique worldviews, prejudices, and limitations from their time on Earth. Most importantly, there is no omniscient narrator to introduce these characters. The reader must rely on the unfiltered speech and actions of the characters to understand the story. The reader’s usual place of balance and certainty, an uninvolved onlooker, is pulled from under him. The reader is zooming down a hill with no training wheels, tossed into the deep end with no floaties.
Why would Saunders do this to us, his loyal readers? I can’t speak for the author’s intention, but I can say that its effect is to allow us to feel as rudderless and untethered as the souls in the Bardo, as a loving father grieving the loss of his young son. Outside of religion, there is no roadmap for navigating one’s own death or the death of a loved one. There was no roadmap for guiding a young nation through a vicious war that could easily have been the destruction of that nation. When all is said and done, each person must determine his path, without the benefit of GPS, and we cannot understand other people’s paths because there is no narrator in life to explain.
I’m Marjory Hall from Goodwell, Oklahoma, with a Book Byte for Fall, 2025.
REFERENCES
Lincoln, Abraham. speech to the Illinois Republican State Convention, Springfield, IL, June 16, 1858, https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/housedivided.htm
