Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of polyphony and the polyphonic novel as reflected in J.M. Coetzee's Summertime and Diary of a Bad Year

This study aims to scrutinize J.M. Coetzee's Summertime and Diary of a Bad Year, which were published in 2000s following Coetzee's relocation in Australia, in terms of the concept of polyphonic novel. Mikhail Bakhtin defines the concept of polyphony in his theoretical studies. The concept of polyphony, by destroying the superiority of the ultimate authorial voice, includes multiple voices, and enables each voice to speak, and Bakhtin bases his studies of polyphony on Dostoevsky and his novels. Bakhtin argues that Dostoevsky has been the first author who involves the concept of polyphony into his novels and who creates polyphonic works. Polyphony disregards the perception of 'the author's voice as ultimate and unique,' and provides all the characters with the freedom to speak their own ideas without the intrusion of authoritative voice. In a polyphonic novel, the characters are in continuous dialogical relations, and the novel has an open-ended plot. This open-ended closure of the novel makes it impossible to have an ultimate judgment/interpretation about the novel and it enables each reader to perceive the novel by filtering it through his/her own ideology and perception. This thesis also explores how Coetzee embodies polyphony in his own unique way in his two novels, Summertime and Diary of a Bad Year. Keywords: Polyphony, Polyphonic Novel, Mikhail Bakhtin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, J.M. Coetzee