ABSTRACT
The grief and despair discussed in this chapter are emotions related to the irretrievable loss of someone dear, emotions that call the world into question and challenge the very meaning of life. Grief is usually considered in an individual perspective, but in Lincoln in the Bardo and Sing, Unburied, Sing the bereavements are not only individually experienced. On the contrary, they are linked to the mass deaths of several hundreds of men killed in action during the American Civil War and the lynching of thousands of African-American people from late 19th century on, respectively. In this way bereavement and reactions to it are represented also as collective phenomena. Both Saunders and Ward use spirits and ghosts to express the relationship and hence the contiguity between the living and the dead. They show that magical thinking is not false causal action but expressive action, where the expression itself is the fulfilment. As these novels demonstrate, magical thinking has to do with persuasion and expansion of meaning and is a performative act that offers solutions to existential problems. Thus, we have attempted to go beyond the medical understanding of grief and illustrate how fiction might challenge such an acknowledged understanding of the emotion.
