“This undiscovered country” in Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille and George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo

Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s The Dirty Dust (1949, trans. 2015) and George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) illustrate two very different uses of the literary device of conversations in a cemetery. Ó Cadhain distilled the venom of selfishness and vicious back-biting found in a small rural Irish village then refined it through comedy and satire, while Saunders created a collage of voices by employing a combination of fantastic devices together with fragments of history, newspaper articles and biography to eulogize Abraham Lincoln as grieving parent and to demonstrate that love does indeed transform the world – even the world of the dead.