Bakhtin, Polyphony, and Notes from Underground

When we approach Dostoevsky through Bakhtin, we enter a theoretical world as rich and unsettling as Dostoevsky’s own fiction. Much of what follows draws on Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, where he develops his most influential account of Dostoevsky’s art. Many of us first encountered Bakhtin in university with his strange technical word chronotope. Yet Bakhtin’s greatest innovation is not temporal-spatial categories, but his theorization of the novel as a polyphonic genre — a form that allows multiple voices to coexist without reduction to a single authoritative perspective.

The Poetics of Polyphony

Bakhtin calls polyphony the “chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels”: “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses.” This is not just a stylistic flourish but a profound generic innovation. Against homophony (a single-voiced harmony) Dostoevsky creates polyphony (multivoicedness). Against monological worldviews (where one truth prevails) he stages the dialogical (where truths confront one another in conversation).

Polyphony gives coherence to what at first seems chaotic. Dostoevsky’s characters are not merely psychological portraits or narrative functions: they are ideological voices, each irreducible, unfinalizable, and indeterminate. To monologize Dostoevsky is to misread him. This dialogical form destabilizes absolute truth. Dostoevsky subverts the idea of a finished consciousness or value system. His characters remain open, ambiguous, contradictory.

Bakhtin links this to three traditions. The first is the carnivalesque, with its parody, reversals, and world turned upside down. The second is the Socratic dialogue, where truth emerges not from declaration but through interlocution — using syncrisis (juxtaposing voices) and anacrisis (provoking the interlocutor to speak). The third is the Menippean satire, originating with Menippus and carried through Lucian, Varro, Seneca, Erasmus, Burton, and Sterne. This form allowed for radical moral-psychological experimentation: depictions of insanity, split personalities, unrestrained daydreaming, extreme passions, and suicide. Such phenomena disrupt epic wholeness, revealing the self’s noncoincidence with itself. Dreams in epic are prophetic; in the Menippea they dissolve the unity of character.

For Bakhtin, only the novel as a genre can contain this polyphony of life. Dostoevsky’s greatness lies in his mastery of it.

Polyphony in Notes from Underground

How does this theory illuminate Notes from Underground (1864)? The Underground Man is an antihero, his story an antibook. His voice refuses closure. He mocks life beyond forty, likens himself to a mouse, takes perverse pleasure in toothache. He rejects Petersburg’s Europeanization, ridicules scientific determinism, and attacks the “beautiful and lofty.” His narrative is fragmented, structured by question-and-answer, repetition, contradiction, and indecision.

The repetitions — especially of “the beautiful and lofty” — destabilize meaning. Laughter erupts into the text: “Ha ha ha” begins whole chapters. He addresses imagined interlocutors as “sirs and gentlemen,” turning confession into confrontation. Beneath this unstable surface lies a systematic critique of Enlightenment, Romantic, and utilitarian values. Rational egoism, progress, even mathematics itself are targets. For Dostoevsky, man is whimsical, ungrateful, destructive as well as creative. To reduce him to logic or profit is impossible.

Key provocations emerge. Suffering is embraced, even loved, because it produces consciousness. Inertia becomes a moral choice. Free will asserts itself irrationally, often against one’s best interest. Advantage itself is destabilized: there can be advantage in disadvantage. The Underground Man delights in exposing these paradoxes. His narrative is self-reflexive, deeply confessional, yet always directed outward — to readers, interlocutors, imagined critics.

Bakhtin’s Dimensions of Discourse

Bakhtin defines discourse in Dostoevsky by three features: ‘addressivity,’ ‘dialogism,’ and ‘undecidability.’ Notes from Underground exemplifies all three. Even though it is deliberately confessional, it remains discourse in Bakhtin’s strong sense.

He distinguishes three dimensions of discourse.

The first is 'discourse about the Other.' The Underground Man lives in constant internal polemic with imagined interlocutors. His speech breaks under the pressure of others’ anticipated words, producing a ‘perpetuum mobile’ of dialogized self-consciousness. He is trapped in dependence on the Other, destroying himself in their eyes while disillusioned with symbolic identifications. Here is an example of that inescapable perpetuum mobile of dialogized self-consciousness: his words seem to chase endlessly after the voices of others.

The second is 'discourse about himself.' He dialogues endlessly with himself. His words are full of ‘loopholes,’ always glancing sideways, ambiguous even to him. The result is a polyphony of selfhood: the Underground Man is split, elusive, noncoincident with himself. Bakhtin strikingly adds that not only his discourse but his face itself carries a loophole — a ‘sideward glance’ that makes him ambiguous and elusive even to himself.

The third is 'discourse about the world.' His polemic extends to society, history, even nature. The world itself is addressed dialogically, as if he were conversing with it. In this discourse on the world there are two voices sounding for him, among which he cannot find himself or his own world. Even the world he defines with a ‘loophole’: interrupted, fractured, full of clashing evaluations. Just as his body has become an “interrupted” thing in his own eyes, so is the world, nature, society perceived by him as “interrupted.” In each of his thoughts about them there is a ‘battle of voices,’ ‘evaluations,’ points of view.

This is discourse in Bakhtin’s strongest sense: dialogical to its core, resistant to final interpretation.

Concluding Reflections

Polyphony is not just a descriptive label for Dostoevsky’s style; it is the essence of his philosophical vision. Notes from Underground dramatizes this through its repetitions, contradictions, confessional instability, and constant polemic with others, self, and world.

But the text also presses a further question: does the intensely confessional voice of the Underground Man complicate Bakhtin’s thesis? Is Notes too close to monologue to be fully polyphonic? Or is it precisely this tension — between monologue and dialogue, between confession and polyphony — that gives the work its enduring power?

Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics remains the foundational text for these insights, and it continues to provide a lens through which we can read Dostoevsky not only as a novelist of ideas, but as the great innovator of the polyphonic form.

References

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonosky. Knopf Doubleday, 1993.