A Bakhtinian Analysis of Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Heteroglossia, Polyphony, and Carnival

Abstract

This thesis analyzes Toni Morrison’s Beloved using a detailed examination of the Bakhtinian concepts of heteroglossia, polyphony and the carnivalesque to investigate the points of mutual illumination and confirmation between Bakhtin’s ideas and Morrison’s novel. Therefore the method of analysis is divided between a close study of Beloved and an equally close examination of Bakhtin’s ideas. The Bakhtinian concepts studied in this thesis are central to his idea of language and theory of the novel and their analysis in Beloved reveals that while these concepts shed light on the stylistic, structural and thematic complexities of the novel, the novel also verifies the working of these concepts in practice. As this thesis shows, Morrison’s Beloved is a dialogic novel in this regard, with its foregrounding of dialogic relations between heteroglot languages, characters’ voices and social classes. This thesis ends with a discussion indicating postmodern aspects of Bakhtin’s ideas and Morrison’s novel, which include intertextuality, the problematization of truth, and the blurring of boundaries between opposites.