The construction of the character and her speeches: an analysis of Mafalda's strips from Bakhtin

Abstract

This article aims to analyze how we can verify Bakhtin's concepts of inner dialogue, exotopy, vision surplus, finishing, material emotive-volitional orientation and axiological surplus in the construction of characters and their speeches in Mafalda's comic strips, created by Argentine cartoonist, Quino. For this, we selected two strips, the first being a dialogue between Mafalda and a crab, in which it is possible to observe Mafalda's dialogical articulation with her own; and the second strip, in turn, brings a dialogue between Mafalda, her best friend – Susanita – and her colleague Filipe, in a conversation full of discordant points of view and discourses established from conceptions constructed by references coming from social classes, context political and economic in which the characters are inserted. After the analysis, it was possible to perceive the analysis carried out shows that several of the concepts coined by Bakhtin can be verified in the strips, from the construction of the (anti) heroine Mafalda, with her irony and ideological alignment inherited from the author, to the elaborations of the characters' statements loaded with opinions that call to reflection on the great human questions.