Poetics of Polyphonic Novel Related to the Free Indirect Speech

Abstract

Since its appearance of M. Bakhtin s concept of Polyphony, this concept has attracted scholarly attentions from various academic disciplines. This article, giving a general contour of literary criticism on the concept, scrutinizes the linguistic features of Polyphonic Novel, which includes a diversity of voices. Bakhtin explores not formal grammatical description(Free indirect speech as a style of third-person narration which uses the third-person pronoun and past tense with deictics indicating the present), but speech interference that could create a relationship between two utterances and between two different points of view. The concept of Speech Interference served as theoretical framework for understanding speech interaction which tends toward the weakening of boundaries, permitting the infiltration of the utterance by authorial commentary, including the Double-voiced discourse. Through this examination, the major contribution of this study to the features of Polyphonic Novel, is that the essence of Polyphonic Novel lies precisely in the fact that the utterance as a ideological positions are combined in a unity of a higher order than in homophony, without being judged by an authoritative authorial discourse.