Polyphony (Bakhtin)

Polyphony, in Mikhail Bakhtin’s technical sense, names a textual condition—not merely the presence of multiple characters or points of view, which any novel possesses, but the presence of multiple autonomous consciousnesses, each with its own irreducible worldview, each fully realized in its own terms, none subordinated to the author’s own ideological position. Bakhtin identified this condition in the novels of Dostoevsky, specifically in works like The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot, where Ivan Karamazov’s argument against God is not positioned as a thesis to be refuted by the novel’s conclusion but stands as an autonomous intellectual position, as powerful on the last page as on the page where it first appears. Polyphony requires an act of authorial renunciation: the surrender of the last word, the willingness to let characters think in their own terms rather than serving as vehicles for the author’s ideas. The concept is not merely literary