Abstract
While George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) has many of the characteristics of the traditional historical novel—lapse of time, incorporation of historical characters, focus on important world-historical events and conditions—it intriguingly challenges the boundaries of the genre by an unsettling approach to verisimilitude. In addition, its fragmentation and an unusual approach to narrative help to qualify it as a neo-historical novel. The author’s thoughts on historical fiction help to clarify its positioning.
Highlights
George Saunders’s 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo is a historical novel by all the usual criteria, whether they rely on its content, its temporality, or the significance of its themes
Grant Rodwell defines a novel as historical fiction “when it is wholly or partly about the public events and social conditions which are the material of history, regardless of the time at which it is written” (Rodwell 2013, p. 48)
Whether we focus upon the “documentary” chapters, with their multitudinous short excerpts from primary and secondary sources, or on the narrative—or really dramatic—chapters, in which the many vividly characterized inhabitants of the Bardo speak, one after another, to advance the story of the Lincoln family Lincoln in the Bardo is strikingly fragmentary
Summary
George Saunders’s 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo is a historical novel by all the usual criteria, whether they rely on its content, its temporality, or the significance of its themes. Grant Rodwell defines a novel as historical fiction “when it is wholly or partly about the public events and social conditions which are the material of history, regardless of the time at which it is written”
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