When Lincoln talks about reenacting the Abraham Lincoln assassination, he says:

People are funny about they Lincoln shit. Its historical. People like they historical shit in a certain way. They like it to unfold the way they folded it up. Neatly like a book. Not raggedy and bloody and screaming” (57). 

Abraham Lincoln has become a mythic figure in American history as the emancipator of the slaves, and his assassination framed him as a martyr and a saint. But the assassination itself was messy and brutal. John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head. He hurt—possibly broke—his ankle while escaping. Lincoln lived, comatose, for nine hours before dying. Lincoln’s bloody coat and the pillow he bled and died on have toured museums as grisly relics of the event. After his death, Abraham Lincoln’s body toured the country, allowing mourners to express their profound grief and sorrow. Booth died shortly after the assassination, tracked and shot in a burning barn.

In Topdog/Underdog, Lincoln reenacts the assassination, living it over and over. He describes this situation in these terms: “And if Im alive then he can shoot me dead. And for a minute, with him hanging back there behind me, its real.