In Saunders' imagining, the spirit of Willie is able to re-enter his body while his father holds him. Saunders crafts the plot around the fact that after Willie's body was placed in a borrowed tomb, Lincoln returned to the crypt several times to hold his son. Lincoln was one of the saddest, most sensitive souls that they ever witnessed. We learn he's also talking to a child, and that child turns out to be the recently deceased Willie, son of Abraham Lincoln. "And so our plan must be deferred, while I recovered," he explains to his friend, Roger Bevins III. He explains, "On our wedding day I was forty-six, she was eighteen." Rather than force himself on his young bride, he proposed that they be "friends." Under this no-pressure system, she gradually warms up to him and invites him to "expand the frontiers of our happiness together in that intimate way to which I am, as yet, a stranger." But just when Hans' hopes are about to be fulfilled, he's crushed by a falling beam at his printing office and placed in a "sick-box" in the parlor. The book starts with a monologue by a speaker named Hans Vollman. Each of Saunders' sentences are exquisitely composed, swiftly bringing you into the hearts of his strange, fascinating characters. The only thing you can do is listen keenly for a while, until you begin to make out the contours of the situation. Opening Lincoln in the Bardo is like alighting suddenly on an unfamiliar moonscape, where disembodied voices are already deep in conversation. Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders (Handout)
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