47 pages • 1 hour read
George SaundersA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Hans Vollman, a naked man with an erection and a dented head, tells the story of his death. At 46 years old, he married an 18-year-old who was nervous to consummate their marriage. He gave her space, and over time they became good friends. She made his household come alive, and he took care of her. Before long, she left him a note that she was ready to have sex. The first night they shared a bed, they only held one another; they agreed to go further the next night. But the next day, Hans was hit in the head with a fallen ceiling beam, delaying the consummation of the marriage for his recovery. Frustrated, he complained in his bedroom, but curiously his doctor and wife didn’t notice him.
Mrs. Lincoln plans to do away with state dinners because they’re too expensive. Instead, she will host three large receptions, which are more cost-effective. Many abolitionists have skipped the receptions, believing it inappropriate to attend a party while the country is in a civil war. Willie, one of the President’s sons, catches a cold while playing with his pony. The cold develops into a burning fever on the night of one of his mother’s parties. His heavy breathing frightens her.
Historians analyze the recordings of guests’ eyewitness experiences at Mrs. Lincoln’s reception, which detail a splendid party with many important people. Guests try to enjoy themselves amidst the confusion and unknowns of the new war, but many report feeling disgusted by the grandeur of the party during wartime. President and Mrs. Lincoln try to host the party with a positive attitude, but both step out frequently to check on Willie’s deteriorating condition.
Willie’s condition grows worse every minute. At the party, the Hutchinson family performs a rendition of “Ship on Fire,” a song about a ship wrecked by a storm at sea that thrills and titillates the other guests. Many narratives from that night have wildly conflicting details: Even the weather remains hard to pin down as some recall a brilliant moon, while others describe a cloudy, moonless night. The party doesn’t end until early the next morning. Willie is worse. He dies. In the future, people will speculate that the party helped usher in Willie’s death by ensuring his neglect that night.
A large procession of carriages rolls into a cemetery with a coffin that holds Willie’s dead body. Willie Lincoln is buried in the last tomb on the extreme edge of the cemetery, at the top of a hill overlooking Rock Creek.
Roger Bevins III, who manifests as a body with many extra faces, tells the story of his death. As a young man, he fell in love with another man, Gilbert. When Gilbert decided to end their secret relationship and live according to their society’s rules, Roger slit his wrists. As Roger slowly died, he realized how beautiful life and the world was; as he is transported into that feeling, he grows even more faces. Hans pauses Roger to calm him down, so some of his faces disappear. Roger reveals that he is waiting to go back home, to clean up the mess he made with his blood, seek forgiveness from his mother, and live without fear. Reverend Everly Thomas joins them and is introduced to the newcomer, a little boy of about 11.
The Reverend asks the boy if he is feeling a certain pull or urge to go somewhere, but the boy just wants to wait for his parents to pick him up. The others assure him that his parents will come but warn that they will not pick him up. The boy, Willie Lincoln, longs for his Christmas toys and resolves to wait.
Hans, the Reverend, and Roger remember that other children they met in the cemetery all left quickly, so they’re surprised to see Willie still on the roof of his grave. They invite Willie to go on a walk with them. At first, Willie reaches out to take one of their hands, then thinks better of it, and walks without bodily contact.
They pass Mrs. Elizabeth Crawford, who wants to show them the plants around them, and Sam “Smooth-Boy” Longstreet, who follows her around and sexually harasses her. Roger, Hans, and the Reverend bring Willie to one of the edges of the cemetery, where the dreaded iron fence stands. None of them can pass the fence, but Elise Traynor is trapped in it. They call out to her, asking her to pass on some warnings for Willie. She beckons him closer and speaks to him in a low voice.
Elise tells Willie about her youth. She loved that young men wanted her, and she was on the cusp of marrying. She had always wanted to have a baby, but she died at 14, before she’d had the chance to truly live. She tells Willie he can come visit her again but says not to bring his friends. She will stay in the fence, waiting to return to green grass and kind looks.
Willie asks Roger, the Reverend, and Hans if what happened to Elise will happen to him. They assure him that it might, so Willie decides to heed their advice. Roger, Hans, and the Reverend accompany Willie back to his white stone tomb. They encourage him to reenter so he can move on through the afterlife. But as Willie says goodbye to them, his face lights up. He has spotted his father.
A tall man walks toward the white stone tomb in the darkness—readers are clearly meant to infer that this is Abraham Lincoln. Hans, Roger, and the Reverend are confused by his presence, as the cemetery is closed to visitors at night. Furthermore, the man had just been there earlier that day to bury Willie. Roger, Hans, and the Reverend remark how rare this occurrence is and try to determine whether the man is sobbing. Willie runs up to the tall man but passes through him, confused. The man lets himself into Willie’s tomb with a key. Willie follows. The tall man slides Willie’s coffin out of the wall and opens it. He sobs over Willie’s dead body.
These chapters consist of fictionalized firsthand accounts and historians’ later appraisals of Willie’s death. The event had a profound effect on President Abraham Lincoln, who loved his son deeply. Willie had been a beautiful, talented, smart, kind, and lively boy, and the president had had high hopes for him. Historical accounts detail Willie’s burial. The President, Mrs. Lincoln, and their son Robert grieved in Willie’s tomb together, alone.
In the tomb, President Lincoln strokes the hair on Willie’s dead body while Willie’s ghost pleads for him to turn around and see him. Lincoln picks Willie’s body up out of the coffin and sits down, cradling his dead son. A crowd of ghosts gathers outside the tomb. Willie attempts to reenter his own body.
As Lincoln speaks to his dead body about their everlasting bond, Willie reenters his corpse to be closer to his father. While thus in physical contact, Willie can hear his father’s thoughts. Lincoln wonders if he is doing something wrong by breaking into Willie’s coffin but believes that it’s good for him to remember Willie again. His visit to the tomb is his own secret and doesn’t harm anyone. He promises Willie to come again. Willie tells the Reverend that his father will come again. The Reverend calls it a miracle.
In the cemetery’s logbook, the watchman records President Lincoln’s entrance. Though the cemetery is technically closed to visitors for the night, the watchman can’t turn away the president of the United States. The president stays for a long time and the watchman worries he is lost.
The novel is comprised of several overlapping layers, each with its own style and generic constraints.
The first is written as historical fiction, with real-life figures such as Abraham Lincoln coping with their day to day lives in the novel’s present. Saunders imagines Abraham Lincoln visiting his son’s grave alone, the night after the funeral—exactly the kind of interstitial plotting historical fiction allows, since it does not break the timeline of history as we know it. Saunders’s contemporary readers know Lincoln as strong and resolute, primarily responsible for managing well one of the biggest crises in American history: the Civil War. Saunders instead concentrates on Lincoln’s inner vulnerability in the fact of the untimely death of his beloved son: The image of a sobbing Lincoln cradling his son’s body offers a humanizing take on this almost mythic figure. In the tomb, Lincoln is not a legend but simply a man who misses his dead son.
The second layer takes a quasi-scholarly approach, mixing fictionalized research publications and eye-witness accounts as though a historian were compiling primary and secondary sources. These snippets offer the advantages and disadvantages of hindsight, as they conflict about details (for instance, the dispute about whether the night of Willie’s death had a bright moon or a cloudy sky) and emphasize things their writers could not have known at the time. In these would-be citations, Saunders imitates journal entries and letters from the time period, as well as later historical analysis. Because there is no voice unifying these excerpts, the effect is of hundreds of narrators, an unresolved tension of perspectives that evokes history better than a single dominating point of view could. Saunders’s point is the cacophony itself, which echoes the multitude we see in the land of the dead. That these citations are written from the novel’s future offers further contrast to the novel’s other timeframes: the past lives of the ghosts and the present lamentation of President Lincoln.
The third layer offers a much broader view, as the ghosts of over a hundred years of history cling to their meaningless existence in the cemetery’s bardo rather than acknowledge their deaths. Their voices evoke older conventions of English, giving readers a sense of history as the US formed. The term “bardo” comes from Tibetan Buddhism and describes a state of existence between life and death; the length of time a spirit exists in the bardo depends on how they lived. Saunders gives readers clues that for his ghosts, the bardo is a self-created trap. Hans and Roger, for example, tell their stories without directly acknowledging their deaths: Roger still sees himself as an unfound body in the kitchen, and Hans still sees himself in his deathbed, hoping his doctor and wife would pay attention to him. They cling to life and their past existence rather than accepting the truth about themselves, calling their graves “sick-holes” as though there is hope for a cure. Children leave the bardo in minutes: They have no regrets or unfinished business to ruminate over. Ghosts on the cusp of adulthood like Willie and Elise, however, are old enough to enter the trap. For example, Willie does not want to leave the bardo because he expects to be picked up by his parents and misses his Christmas toys and his father’s embrace; similarly, Elise dreams of once again being sought after by wooers. The adult and near-adult ghosts must learn how to exit this state and embrace death. Their horror of moving on will be the most profound danger they face.
Saunders builds the historicity of his cemetery world through the meticulous recreation of different eras of English. Elise uses an older style of capitalization, spelling, and vocabulary anachronistic to that of Roger, which clarifies without narrative intervention that these characters died in different time periods. Other stylistic choices specify socioeconomic differences between ghosts. Only in the uniformity of death can diverse historical groups mingle; their conflicts and compromises seem to be a version of the melting pot American ideal. Willie, the son of a president, is buried in a private corner of the cemetery, in a white stone home that evokes the power and prestige of the White House. While alive, Willie would never have mingled with those from the lower classes. But in the bardo, he must rely on them to escape.
By George Saunders
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