Heteroglossia in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17722/jell.v2i1.32Keywords:
Achebe, Bakhtin, dualism, heteroglossiaAbstract
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe’s first African novel, is a story about the traditional Igbo life in the pre-colonial period. It is often seen as an African national epic by literary critics because of its characterization of a bellicose hero, Okonkwo. These critics pay attention to the unitary epic viewpoint represented by the hero but ignore the diverse opposing viewpoints in the Igbo society of Umuofia. Hence, this paper aims to represent the double-voiced discourses in the novel by adopting M. M. Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia. Bakhtin’s four fundamental forms for incorporating heteroglossia in the novel are utilized to reveal the double-voiced discourses, the voices of the masculine and feminine traditions, in the languages of the novel.
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