Distorted Dialogue in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend: A Bakhtinian Perspective

Hamed Faizi ,Ali Taghizadeh

doi:10.7575/aiac.alls.v.6n.4p.36

Abstract

Based on the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, a dialogue can necessarily take place only in a two-sided communication. But if a party creates a hierarchical situation for the domination of its voice in the context, the communication will no longer be dialogic. In I Am Legend , Richard Matheson depicts a post-apocalyptic world that is destroyed due to the spread of a disease which metamorphoses people into bugs. The bacterium of this disease is denotatively and symbolically the aftermath of a war in which every party attempts to suppress the other parties to establish a monologue to its own advantage. But Robert Neville, Matheson’s main character, tries to find a cure for this exasperation. As he kills the new creatures, his attempt is a measure to delete the factors which make the “other” intolerable for him. When the new nonhuman race is ultimately at the threshold of creating another society, they look upon him in the same way he used to look upon them. However, the new society finally decides to execute him. A Bakhtinian reading of the novel shows that almost all the position-holders try to erase the dialogue and establish their own authority. It causes disastrous consequences like violent exclusions. The present research takes it to analyze the attempts in the novel which want to destroy dialogue, and to expose the disastrous results of each participant’s efforts to exclude the other party. These efforts lead each party, especially the marginalized one, to an alienation where they have to spend their times in violence and frustration. Keywords: I Am Legend , Matheson, Bakhtin, Dialogism, Monologism, Post-apocalypse

Highlights

In the Bakhtinian dialogic context the voices are independent
Bemong and Borghart state that, “Since western scholars became acquainted with his writings in the 1970s and 1980s, the Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin has been an indispensable figure in literary theory and a number of related disciplines in the humanities” (2010, p. 3)
In a monopolizing system, “everything ideological falls into two categories; the first category is certain thoughts–true, signifying thoughts” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 79), and the second category is comprised of those thoughts which are not considered false or untruthful by the authority

Summary

Introduction

In the Bakhtinian dialogic context the voices are independent. Mikhail Bakhtin takes it natural to dialogue that each voice should interact with other voices while it has the right freely to be spoken out in the context. The present study will intend critically to analyze all of them It seems that Matheson’s novel has not yet been approached in the light of Bakhtinian theories on dialogism and unfinalizability in fiction. The present research attempts to critically analyze the efforts both of the humans and the newly born society to wipe each other off the scene of existence Each of these species in Matheson’s novel tries to do so by imposing the logic of his or her own monologue on the other species. Such a conduct leads to the execution of Robert while he is the last hope of a still uninfected human race to find a cure for the disease. Trying to exclude a participant from the dialogue will ground the establishment of a monologue with disastrous issues that violently excludes that participant

Discussion and Analysis

Conclusion