Abstract

This paper aims at investigating heteroglossic situations in Toni Morrison’s novel using Mikhail Bakhin’s Polyphony as an approach. In Discourse in the Novel, Mikhail Bakhtin presented his views on extralinguistic features of a language, such as perspectives, evaluation, and ideological positioning as the basic qualities of the novel. The main argument is that the novel as aformof narrative art can be evaluated in terms of a series of heteroglossic situations by trying to focus the speech acts, implicatures, emotions, ideological differences, etc. which are the basic constituents of its narrative discourse.To this effect Bakhtin’s theoretical assumptions on heteroglossia are applied to the selected situations from the novel with an aim to discover heteroglot features. The novel depicts a story of a black girl named Pecola Breedlove, who is brought up with negative images in very hostile circumstances because she does not possess blue eyes and fair skin. The novelist very tactfully usesgaps and holes at many places to involve readers and critics to come with their own appreciation. There are shifts of discourse and description of other upcoming events as well without providing final ending to the previous events. It is scrutinized that heteroglossic situations arise when an absolution of ‘self’ uniqueness ‘A is A’ flops to be effective as well as appropriate in an art of communiqué due to multiple other correspondingly powerful but entirely different perspectives.

Key words: Heteroglossia, centripetal and centrifugal forces, polyphony, The Bluest Eye