Notes to Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" THE DIDACTICISM AND THE STRUCTURE

The Didactic and the Structure

Lev Tolstoy is a didactic writer. His works often preach a moral message. By the time he wrote “Ivan Ilich” (1886) he had undergone a deep religious crisis that changed his attitude toward art and life. He condemned some of his best works out of hand. He considered his Anna Karenina—which many literary critics rate the best novel ever written in all of world literature—nothing but a piece of trash.

In the last third of his long life he became a kind of preacher, writing philosophical tracts and essays on how to live a morally upright life. He certainly intends “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” to deliver a message to his reader: “You are living useless immoral lives; change while you still have time.” The emphasis on didacticism does a bit of damage to the aesthetics of the work, and it is largely due to Tolstoy’s amazing literary talent that “Ivan Ilyich” remains a creative triumph.

The very structure of the story lends itself to the moral message. The title tells us upfront that the main character dies, so that we know how the story comes out even before we begin reading it. Then the action begins backwards chronologically: on the first page the death is reported. After the funeral, in a flashback technique, Ivan Ilyich is brought back to life, only to spend the rest of the story dying.

Only near the end do we realize the supreme irony of this story: that when Ivan dies on the final page his death is really a kind of birth, a spiritual rebirth. The long, agonizing death by cancer has been a preparation for this entry into a new spiritual life. On the other hand, practically his whole previous life, everything antecedent to his illness, was a kind of living death, no life at all, but just fakery, a pretend life.

This inside-out perspective, then, is reflected in the structure of the story. It begins with a death, returns to describe a useless life or living death, progresses to the climax of this living death—the scene where Ivan Ilyich, who is engaged in what Tolstoy sees as a frivolous bourgeois pursuit (hanging curtains and prettifying his new apartment) falls and bruises his kidney, the first step on his passage to death by (apparently) cancer of the kidney—then shows the gradual progression of painfully dying, which leads to new life.

Furthermore, this pattern seems to repeat itself in endless cycles. The early scenes, describing the reactions of Ivan Ilyich’s colleagues in the court of law to his death, are structured as if to show the ghost of the former, unredeemed Ivan Ilyich returning to live out the same vile life all over again. His colleagues are his alter egos, and their reaction to news of his death is exactly the same as his reaction would have been, had one of them died before him: concern with trivial court matters; thoughts of promotion and higher salaries (“Maybe my brother-in-law can get the vacated position.”); smug satisfaction in the death of another (“Ah, great; it was him and not me.”).

Pyotr Ivanovich is almost a twin of Ivan Ilyich—same education, same job, same aspirations, same attitudes toward life, and with the same favorite diversion: playing cards. When he attends the funeral in the early pages of the story it is as if a character were attending his own funeral in advance, and, of course, refusing to acknowledge that the corpse lying there with reproach on its dead face is almost exactly he himself.

The didactic point, of course, in all of this paralleling of characters, is obvious. Everyone in Ivan Ilyich’s society is living a morally stagnant life, a dead life, but the agonizing death of a colleague who had lived just the same life does not prompt them to reevaluate their morals. On the contrary, they avoid facing the issue and go off to play cards, Ivan Ilyich’s favorite pastime and favorite way of avoiding looking at life’s unpleasant facts. 

Like Shvartz—another double/colleague of Ivan Ilyich, who shows up to pay his respects but sneaks out to play cards, skipping the funeral service—they wink as if to say, “Ivan Ilyich has done a really dumb thing; but you and me, we’re not about to screw up the way he did.” The Russian here is “Глупо распорядился Иван Ильич; то ли дело мы с вами.”

Notes on Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Ilyich" "ANYBODY BUT ME" The Caius Syllogism

The Caius Syllogism

In Tolstoy’s story there is not a single character who conceives of his/her own individual death. Absolutely all of Ivan Ilyich’s family and all of his friends—except Gerasim the servant—go to great efforts to shield themselves from that dire possibility. In fact, Gerasim, practically the only positive character in the whole long story, most likely does not believe in his own death either. He simply is more willing to accept the fact that death does exist and that the dying should be comforted as little children are.

In Chapter Six Ivan Ilyich recalls a passage from a textbook of logic by J. G. Kiesewetter (1766-1819), widely used in Russian schools and seminaries. The passage citing the Kiesewetter syllogism and describing Ivan Ilyich’s attitude toward it is probably one of the best in world literature in regard to how an individual regards his/her own death.

“The syllogism he had learned from Kiesewetter’s Logic: ‘Caius [Julius Caesar] is a man; men are mortal; therefore Caius is mortal,’ had for all his life seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius—man in the abstract—was mortal was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite apart from all others. He had been little Vanya, with a mama and a papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with toys, a coachman and a nurse, then, afterwards, with Katenka and with all the joys, griefs and ecstasies of childhood, boyhood and youth. What did Caius know of the smell of that striped leather ball that Vanya had so loved? Had Caius kissed his mother’s hand like that, and did the silk of pleats in her dress rustle that same way for Caius? Had he rioted like that at the School of Law when burnt pastry was served? Had Caius been in love the way he had? Could Caius preside at a judicial session the way he could? Caius really was mortal, and it was right for him to die; but for me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilyich, with all my thoughts and emotions, it’s altogether a different matter. And it just cannot be that I ought to die. That would be altogether too horrible.”

In voicing such thoughts, Ivan Ilyich speaks for the whole human race, then and now. A refusal to face one’s death appears to be built into the human psyche as a kind of instinct of self-preservation. Here is a quote from Sigmund Freud:

“It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators. Hence the psychoanalytic school could venture on the assertion that at bottom no one believes in his own death, or, to put the same thing in another way, that in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality” (from “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death”). 

But the matter more often is expressed not by “I cannot conceive of my death,” but by the words Ivan Ilyich screams out for three straight days at the end of the story: “Я не хочу (I don’t want to).”

Taking off on the Kiesewetter syllogism, other thinkers have come up with their own:

(1)    The Israeli writer Amos Oz, in a discussion of Tolstoy’s story: “Everyman [note that this is written as one word] is indeed mortal; but I am not everyman—I am me.”

(2)    The writer R. Beauvais: Everyone in the history of the world, so far, has ended up dying. But I’m still alive. Therefore I choose never to die.”

(3)    Vladimir Nabokov in Pale Fire (Canto 2): “A syllogism: other men die; but I//Am not another; therefore I’ll not die.”

(4)    The philosopher Arnold Arms, taking off on Oz: “Everyone who has ever died since the creation of the world has been someone else; I am not someone else, I am me: therefore, I do not consent to die.”

Eventually, Tolstoy forces his character Ivan Ilyich into the final realization that he is Caius, and, of course, all human beings are eventually forced down that same dead end. The critic Ronald Blythe writes that if we do not take the trouble to grow up and accept death, we’ll have to leave the world the same way we entered it: kicking and screaming. He quotes the symbolist Maeterlinck as amazed at the crudeness of Western man’s thought when it comes to the subject of his own death: “We deliver death into the dim hands of instinct, and we grant it not one hour of our intelligence.”

Perhaps true, but the instinct of self-preservation precludes our acceptance of individual death. What kind of life can you live if you have your own death ever on your mind? No kind of life. George Steiner has written that human beings could not survive without the future tense, which is a chimera. The future does not really exist, but we invent it and make our plans for years in advance. This “looking forward” to the future gives us a reason to live. Death, on the other hand, is a future event best ignored. At least if we hope to enjoy what little time we have here on earth.

Notes on Lev Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" TOLSTOY AND DEATH

Tolstoy, Moscow, 1885

Notes to “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”  TOLSTOY AND DEATH

“The Death of Ivan Ilyich” was completed on March 25, 1886, and published later that same year. in July, 1881, Tolstoy had learned of the death (by stomach cancer) of Ivan Ilyich Mechnikov, an acquaintance of his. Mechnikov, a public prosecutor in the Tula district judicial system, according to his widow, had undergone a deep spiritual change in his last months on earth and had come to regard his life as wasted.

Tolstoy died in 1910, twenty-nine years after the man who was the prototype for his fictional Ivan Ilyich. On his deathbed the old man was reported to have said, “I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do.” This is an interesting statement in regard to dying in general: exactly how is anyone supposed to behave on his/her deathbed? What are we supposed to do?

The question is especially relevant for Tolstoy, who was obsessed with death for practically the whole of his life, but still did not know what to do when the time came to face death. As Ronald Blythe suggests, in his introduction to the Bantam paperback translation, Tolstoy, the “lifelong death-watcher,” may have written this story, at least in part, for therapeutic purposes—in an attempt to better understand the process of death by airing the theme in his own art, and, consequently, to come to terms with his own future death.

But a case can be made for asserting that Tolstoy’s attitude in writing this story is somewhat like that of the characters—Ivan’s court colleagues and fellow card players—who react (see chapter one) to the death of Ivan Ilyich by pushing it out of their minds: “Glad it’s him and not me. Sure, he died, but me, I’ll never die; I’m indestructible.”

As Blythe writes, “the chief reason why we can tolerate death in others, even in those near to us, is that it pushes it away from ourselves.” If Tolstoy had really wanted to look squarely into the face of his own death, he could have written the story of a dying artist, of a man with the same spiritual concerns and preoccupations as he himself. Instead, he chose to write about the most ordinary of philistines, a man with practically no redeeming moral or spiritual values.

In so doing Tolstoy (probably subconsciously) was acting somewhat like Ivan’s friend and colleague Pyotr Ivanovich acted in the first chapter of the story. P.I. does his best at the funeral not to look closely at the corpse—with the implicit message on its dead brow: “Get right with the world before it’s too late.” He escapes the proceedings as soon as possible and goes off to play cards. For P.I. cards are the diversion that push the fact of approaching death out of his mind, keeping death at bay. Ironically, cards had also played an important role, as escape and diversion, in the life of Ivan Ilyich.

Tolstoy’s diversion is on a loftier level; it is literary art. But if the author’s fear of death motivated him, at least in part, to write this story, if something like self-therapy played a role, so what? The result is still great art. “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” is one of the greatest works in all of world literature on the subject of death and dying.

Notes on Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" RUSSIAN LITERATURE AND ESCHATOLOGY

Notes on “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”

Russian Literature and Eschatology

Eschatology is the branch of theology dealing with the final things: death, judgment, immortality. In Tolstoy’s story Ivan Ilyich wears a medallion on his watch chain with a maxim that reads, in Latin, respice finem (look to the end). The maxim in full goes like this: Quidquid agis, prudenter agis et respice finem (Whatever you do, do it with care and look to the end [result]).

You might say that Russian literature is preeminently the literature that looks to the end, since Russian writers, especially the big two of the nineteenth century, Tolstoevsky—Tolstoy and Dostoevsky—are intently preoccupied with eschatology. Russian literature teems with grandiose eschatological speculation.

As for Tolstoy’s character Ivan Ilyich, although he wears the motto on his person, he spends his whole life looking only to the present day and never to the final end. He pays no attention to the admonition, and his creator, Tolstoy, makes him pay dearly for his lack of acumen. 

BOOK REVIEW ARTICLE "Lincoln in the Bardo," by George Saunders

BOOK REVIEW ARTICLE

George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo (Random House, 2017)

“All were in sorrow, or had been, or soon would be.” (Roger Bevins III, p. 304)

Okay, so what happens when we die? Writers of fiction have been peering across into that unfathomable abyss from time out of mind. You might even say that this is what great fiction writers do: they look at the grand questions, and especially at immortality, or the lack thereof.

George Saunders’ rather ironic take on the afterlife goes roughly like this: after death some of us get caught up in the fulgurant thing called “the bone-chilling firesound” of the “matterlightblooming phenomenon.” Amidst lots of explosions and smashing to smithereens—imagine something like the shoot-em-up-blow-em-up special effects of Hollywood—this phenomenon transports us off to . . . well, the author never tells us exactly where. Is it a nice place? That’s a good question. At times there are suggestions that it might be fine, but only for the better-behaved of human beings in their fleshy existence, and not even for all of them.

Some of the deceased, so we’re told, resist the matterlightblooming, preferring to hang around in a limbo, neither fish nor fowl. Saunders uses the term “bardo” (borrowed, apparently, from Tibetan religious tradition) for that liminal state, although a better title for this book might be something like Lincoln in Liminality. Why? Because the novel is eminently American, it is anchored in American history; therefore, it might be better not to bring in an obscure term from an alien tradition. 

Sometimes it seems, at any rate, as if we were looking at some standard purgatory, as in the passage where a former hunter is forced to sit before an enormous heap of the animals he had killed over a lifetime, “each of which he must briefly hold, with loving attention, for a period ranging from several hours to several months” (127).

The bardo of this book is Oak Lawn Cemetery in Georgetown, and most of the characters are sort of ghosts who, having been interred there, are now living out their liminality. Why do they resist what is apparently decreed by God’s law: the move on to the next stage in the universal progression? Mainly because they are still bound to the fleshy world from which they have departed. They have left things undone back in the world, and they have hopes of returning to flesh, so they delude themselves, pretending that they are merely ill, not really dead. They have made up euphemisms for unpleasant things. The coffin is a “sick-box,” the hearse is a “sick-cart.” To be dead is to be “unlovable” (70), and the ghosts of Oak Lawn, above all, crave love.

The central plot of the book revolves around the death of Abraham Lincoln’s beloved son Willie in February of 1862. Although Lincoln remains alive, he too is in a state of liminality, stunned by bereavement, frozen by his refusal to accept the death of his son and his wish to believe that even after death father and son can find some sort of communion. Much to the delight of the ghosts of Oak Lawn, Lincoln returns to the cemetery, goes to the crypt of his son, even opens the coffin and holds the dead boy.

Although the author gives the narration briefly to a multitude of narrators throughout the book, there are mainly three tellers of the tale, all of them ghosts. Roger Bevins III, a young homosexual who committed suicide when his lover decided to go straight; Hans Vollman, a forty-six-year-old man who was on the verge of consummating his marriage to a young wife when a ceiling beam fell on his head (consequently he ambles about the bardo with a perpetual erection); the Reverend Everly Thomas, who, unlike the other denizens of the bardo, has already taken a tentative step into the next stage and is terrified of going back there.

In the background of the story is the theme of The War Between the States and the carnage. On the day that Willie is laid to rest the casualty lists from the Union victory at Fort Donelson are announced. “The dead at Donelson, sweet Jesus. Heaped and piled like threshed wheat, one on top or two on top of three. I walked through it after with a bad feeling. Lord, it was me done that, I thought” (152).

In this semi-historical novel of sorts the above quote is attributed to “First Lieutenant Daniel Brower,” cited from “These Battle Memories.” The book is full of citations from historical sources. In addition to sources describing the war, there are others telling of the trauma in the Lincoln household as young Willie wastes away and dies. I have not checked the historical sources, but I strongly suspect that many of them come not out of books, but out of the creative mind of George Saunders.

The sources often contradict each other. In one description of Willie’s final days a variety of different people describe the moon. For some it is full, for some a crescent, for others there was no moon at all in the sky that night. So how was it really? One effect that the author achieves by mixing real and fictional people is to suggest that even those alive in 1862 are now so long gone that they are as insubstantial as fictional characters. 

We come upon one “Prince Felix Salm-Salm, a Prussian nobleman and cavalry officer, who was serving on General Blenker’s staff” (11). Another source on the same page refers to him as “the dashing German Salum-Salum,” and we think, Ah, this is one of Saunders’ made-up characters. But a check on the internet reveals that Salm-Salm actually existed in the flesh. Never mind. He is chimerical now. A big theme of the novel (and of world literature in the age of postmodernism): who is really real and who is chimerical? And, given that we all begin dying on the day we are born, how really real can our lives in flesh be?

But it’s the only thing we have, this temporary existence in flesh, and Saunders sometimes revels in lovely lyrical descriptions of the sensuous joys of life. Here is Roger Bevins, who, having slit his wrists, is having second thoughts: “saw that I was on the brink of squandering a wondrous gift, the gift of being allowed, every day, to wander this vast sensual paradise, this grand marketplace lovingly stocked with every sublime thing: swarms of insects dancing in slant-rays of August sun; a trio of black horses standing hock-deep and head-to-head in a field of snow; a waft of beef broth arriving breeze-borne from an orange-hued window on a chill autumn” (25-26). 

Here is Bevins again later, in the same mode: “such things as, for example: two fresh-shorn lambs bleat in a new-mown field; four parallel blind-cast linear shadows creep across a sleeping tabby’s midday flank; down a bleached-slate roof and into a patch of wilting heather bounce nine gust-loosened acorns” (140-41; this goes on for five more lines).

Bevins’ best buddy in the bardo, Hans Vollman, later launches into a similar lyrical outburst: “the great beauty of the things of this world: waterdrops in the woods around us plopped from leaf to ground; the stars were low, blue-white, tentative; the wind-scent bore traces of fire, dryweed, rivermuck; the tssking drybush rattles swelled with a peaking breeze, as some distant cross-creek sleigh-nag tossed its neck-bells” (171). 

Near the end of the novel (334-35) Bevins gets going again: “a bloody roast death-red on a platter; a hedgetop under-hand as you flee late to some chalk-and-woodfire-smelling schoolhouse” (two whole pages of this). The muse of George Saunders is obviously in charge of the poetry here—for how would Vollman and Bevins, who have never written a line of poetry in their fleshy lives or bardo existence—come up with such stuff? Saunders the poet, it seems, is partial to hyphenated expressions.

What do the semi-dead do with themselves in this particular purgatory, as they wait to get over being “sick” so that they can return to flesh and the carnate pleasures described above? They lead, mostly, a boring life. “We had sat every branch on every tree. Had read and re-read every stone. Had walked down (run down, crawled down, laid upon) every walk, path, and weedy trail, had waded every brook; possessed a comprehensive knowledge of the textures and tastes of the four distinct soil types here; had made a thorough inventory of every hair-style, costume, hair-pin, watch-fob, sock-brace, and belt worn by our compatriots; I had heard Mr. Vollman’s story many thousands of times, and had, I fear, told him my own at least as many times” (Bevins again, 124). One woman keeps herself busy collecting pebbles, twigs, and dead bird parts.

Then again, the ghosts of the bardo, determined as they are to get their lives back, are obsessed with the preoccupations of those still in flesh. Class and race distinctions remain the same. The issue of slavery and abuse of slaves is a sub-theme of the narrative. There are poor white trash ghosts, aristocratic ghosts, racially oppressed ghosts and racist ghosts, all of them fighting for a bit of respect, insisting that the lives they led should be valued. No one, it seems, gets the credit he/she deserves in life, and in their liminal state the semi-dead go on bemoaning that fact. 

A former professor is still nursing his ego: “I made many discoveries previously unknown in the scientific pantheon, for which I was never properly credited.” A former pickle maker still boasts of the loveliness of his wares: “Say, did you ever taste one of my pickles?” (208-09)

In the world of the flesh, apparently nothing ever changes: “things ‘out there’ were as they had been; i.e., eating, loving, brawling, births, binges, grudges, all still proceeded apace” (226). “We were at war, said Mr. Vollman. At war with ourselves.” The reference is to the Civil War, but the war within the bifurcated self is also implied. Human beastliness, so the narrative suggests, might well go on perpetuating itself into eternity, “unless some fundamental and unimaginable alteration of reality should occur” (321). But Saunders’ novel, deeply pessimistic at its core, never suggests that the reality of human existence can be altered. Since the world of the bardo is a place where everyone yearns to go back to being alive, the preoccupations of the bardo-dwellers mirror those of the fleshy world.

When Abraham Lincoln shows up at the cemetery, to visit his dead son Willie in the crypt, the denizens of the bardo perk up. After all, most of those still in flesh shun the land of the semi-dead, but here is a man who embraces his dead boy in the coffin. The man, to boot, is the President, although they do not realize this at first, since many of them have departed the world under President Polk, say, or Buchanan. Some of the most touching scenes in the book are those in which Lincoln attempts to find communion with his dead son’s body—while that son’s shade hovers about, agonizes, unable to make contact with his beloved father. Lincoln comes across as a sympathetic character, bedeviled by countrymen who criticize his running of the war (see p. 232-34), depressed not only by the loss of his own son, but by the many sons of others who have perished in battle.

Lincoln in the Bardo is a postmodernist novel; it presents a narrative that is skewed in harmony with the surrealistic, skewed plot about a world of purgatory. The story unfolds through bits and pieces, staccato bursts of action; the narrative does without the usual “he said” or “she said.” Readers not accustomed to this may find the going hard at first. Here’s a typical example of the way the story is laid out on the page.

I, for one, was afraid of him.

                                                roger bevins iii

I was not afraid of him.

Exactly.

But we had urgent business. Must not linger.

                                                hans vollman

Lots of unused space here (more on the white space later). A normal novel would read as follows: “I, for one, was afraid of him,” said Roger Bevins III. “I was not afraid of him. Not exactly, but we had urgent business and must not linger,” said Hans Vollman. But Saunders, who is writing about a ghost world after death, does not want it done “normal.” This is something like a movie about the supernatural, which uses distortions on the screen, out of focus shots, fadings in and out, along with eerie music in the background, all for effect.

Then again, there is the nineteenth century language used by the characters; nothing odd about that, since the book is set in 1862. But many characters also are shown speaking with misspelled, or even totally distorted words. This too adds to the weirdness effect for which the author strives. Sometimes the inarticulate dead struggle to find the right words. “who kome to ogle and mok me and ask me to swindle no, that is not the werd slender slander that wich I am doing” (39). Those whose existence seems in the final stages of dissipation, such as one Mr. Papers, of whom little is left except “a cringing gray supine line,” cry out for help in a language that dissipates along with them: “Cannery anyhelpmate? Come. To. Heap me? Cannery help? . . . . Place hepMay” (134).

Although American readers these days seem to need a lot of pampering—see some of the complaints about this novel on the Amazon book reviews—the narrative line of the plot is not particularly difficult to follow. You want real difficulty, go back and give James Joyce a try. No contemporary American writer, it appears, would dare write the kind of demanding sentences that we find in his Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. Saunders is to be commended for daring even his modest (compared, say, to Joyce or Nabokov) stylistic innovations and literary devices. Risk taking is not a common thing in the present state of the American novel. 

Saunders here follows rather typical modernist conventions: preferring fragments over wholes, resisting any sort of “closure,” and bathing the whole thing in a subtle irony. Note that we are not talking satire here. Satire implies the possibility that evils can be overcome and life improved. Irony implies a certain light absurdity underlying everything.

Given the postmodernist devices, you might assume that Lincoln in the Bardo is a hard, slow read, but nothing of the sort. It’s a fast read. The unique narrative method makes for few words on a page, and some pages are nearly empty. Here is page 9: “Willie was burning with fever on the night of the fifth, as his mother dressed for the party. He drew every breath with difficulty. She could see that his lungs were congested and she was frightened.” Then the attribution of the source, and that’s it; no more words on the whole page. 

Unless you want to stop and contemplate the meaning of all that empty space, you the reader quickly skip on to page ten. And this is not an isolated occurrence. There are plenty of such  nearly empty pages in the book, and even the regular telling of the tale, split up between the many narrators, leaves globs of white space on every page. The novel in print has a total of 343 pages, but were it printed in a normal way, utilizing the space available on the pages, it would be hardly a novel at all, but a novella or long story of some 200-odd pages.

Furthermore, in a book that is post-modernist in its narrative techniques and ironic stances, Lincoln in the Bardo is often quite conventional in its ethics and morality. What people have done in life very much matters in the afterlife. Judeo-Christian morality is ascendant, and the idea of a Judeo-Christian heaven and hell underlies the action. At one point former persons who have committed the worst sins of all—massacring an entire regiment, murdering loved ones with poison, having sexual congress with children—make their appearance as demons. They consist now of “thousands of writhing tiny bodies, none bigger than a mustard seed, twisting minuscule faces up at us” (267). When Bevins asks them if they are in Hell, one of them replies, “Not in the worst one.” There are many degrees of Hell, and in the worst one skulls are smashed against a series of clustered screwdrivers, or you are sodomized in perpetuity by a flaming bull. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.

At several points in the novel, however, it is suggested that the universe of Judeo-Christian punishment and reward is somehow flawed. One woman, a rather comical character who has murdered her intolerable husband Elmer asks, “Was that my doing? Was that fair? Did I ask to be born licentious, greedy, slightly misanthropic, and to find Elmer so irritating? I did not. But there I was” (269). Here we touch lightly upon the age-old polemic of free will versus determinism. Lincoln in the Bardo rehashes, almost always in an ironic way, many of the major philosophical issues throughout the history of the Western literature.

One of the most enigmatic characters is one of the three main narrators, the Reverend Everly Thomas. This character is different from the other ghosts of the bardo, for he does not delude himself. He knows that he is dead, and he has already once gone beyond the liminality and stood at the threshold of the next stage. What he finds there is another traditional Judeo-Christian scenario, the scene of the Last Judgment. For eight pages in the middle of the book (187-195) he describes what happens when you get to Judgment Day. Along with two others recently deceased he trudges up to the spot of the judgment. “Inside, a vast expanse of diamond floor led to a single diamond table at which sat a man I knew to be a prince; not Christ, but Christ’s direct emissary” (189).

Quite businesslike in his demeanor, this emissary or double of Christ watches as two angels lead, in turn, the three men to be judged up to the table. One asks, “How did you live?” The other says, “Tell it truthfully.” Using a mirror and a scale, the angels look inside the man, remove his heart and weigh it on the scale. The emissary limits himself to two words, “Quick check.” 

The check is quickly made, although the results are puzzling. Apparently blameless individuals are summarily assigned to Hell. You have a feeling that the whole business is badly skewed, in need of a thorough revamping, particularly when the Reverend Thomas—whose life appears to have been almost entirely sinless—is summarily assigned to Hades. Before the angels manage to usher him into the Inferno, poor Thomas flees from the proceedings, somehow makes it back to the Oak Lawn Cemetery, and lives there in limbo, terrified to move on. He is reluctant to tell his fellow limbo-dwellers of the judgment awaiting them, and the angels have forbidden him to do so.

Apparently assuming that children are largely sinless, or have not had time to build up a lengthy catalog of sins, Thomas, Vollman and Bevins make it their task to help Willie Lincoln move out of his liminality and on to the next stage. When they finally accomplish this task Willie is ushered into what is apparently a world of sublime loveliness. “Whatever that former fellow (willie) had, must now be given back (is given back gladly) as it never was mine (never his) and therefore is not being taken away, not at all!

“As I (who was of willie but is no longer (merely) of willie) return

“To such beauty” (301).

What is the reader to make of all this? Well, nothing entirely coherent. Jesus is quoted as saying to his disciples, “What I do ye know not now, but ye shall know hereafter” (292). There’s the big question, not only of this novel, but of many more in Western literature: are we ever really going to know what it’s all about? 

We do know, so the story tells us, what we ought to do. We “must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his [Lincoln’s] current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would yet be felt by scores of others, in all times, in every time . . . . . . All were in sorrow, or had been, or soon would be” (303-04).

Such is the liminal state of humanity. Let’s face it: we’re all in a bardo. Not knowing where we came from. Not knowing what we’re doing here. Not knowing where we’re bound. At times—as in the scene of the Last Judgment—Saunders implies that God and Christ, in their standard Judeo-Christian guise, have not done a very good job at organizing the whole affair. Here is Lincoln, musing on toward the end, over the many dead and the carnage of the war. “I will go on. I will. With God’s help. Though it seems killing must go hard against the will of God. Where might God stand on this? He has shown us. He could stop it. But has not. We must see God not as a Him (some linear rewarding fellow) but an IT, a great beast beyond our understanding, who wants something from us, and we must give it, and all we may control is the spirit in which we give it and the ultimate end which the giving serves. What end does IT wish served? I do not know. . . (310). This goes on for several more lines, but the wishes of IT are never established. And never will be.

Pondering over the issue of human mortality never really gets us anywhere. Here is Lincoln, going round and round in circles again. “Trap. Horrible trap. At one’s birth it is sprung. Some last day must arrive. When you will need to get out of this body. Bad enough. Then we bring a baby here. The terms of the trap are compounded. That baby also must depart. All pleasures should be tainted by that knowledge. But hopeful dear us, we forget.

“Lord, what is this? All of this walking about, trying, smiling, bowing, joking? This sitting-down-at-table, pressing-of-shirts, tying-of-ties, shining-of-shoes, singing-of-songs-in-the-bath?” (155-56)

A good question, and the central question of the book: what is all this? Suffering people scream it out on a daily basis, but no philosopher, theologian, or writer of novels has ever come up with a good answer. Near the end of the novel it is suggested that people can move on out of purgatory when we are no longer sustained by “some lingering, dissipating belief in our own reality” (329-330). What is our own reality? That is what writers of literary fiction are trying to get at.

Tolstoy concludes one of the greatest works in world literature on the subject of mortality, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” with the demise of his main character. As he passes into eternity, Ivan Ilyich, finally suffering his way past the cancer that kills him, muses, “’But death? Where is it?’ He sought for his former usual fear of death and did not find it. Where is death? What death? There was no fear at all, because neither was there any death. Instead of death there was a light. ‘So that’s how it is!’ he suddenly exclaimed aloud. ‘What joy!’”

Critics have sometimes disparaged this death-bed revelation that the author gives to his character at the end of the story. You cannot legitimately have Ivan Ilyich suddenly seeing what’s out there after his death—finding the fulgurant light of joy. Because seeing what’s out there is beyond the ken of any mortal being. Then again, George Saunders knows that the scenario he has invented, his take on what is out there post mortem, has no basis in truth. Is at times based on rather facile re-imaginings of scenarios long current in world literature and the Western religious tradition. But imagining, as Mary Todd Lincoln does, that her dead son is somewhere—“Musn’t he yet be somewhere?” (182), something more than “a passing, temporary energy-burst” (244)—that imagining gives human beings the strength to go on living.

To me there is good reason for all the empty white space on the pages of Saunders’ book. That space tangibly suggests the emptiness, the wretched void against which people go on struggling in order to live: the possibility, ever unacceptable, that there is nothing out there but white noise.