In literature, polyphony (Russian: полифония) is a feature of narrative, which includes a diversity of simultaneous points of view and voices.
Dostoevsky's novels, according to Bakhtin, cannot be understood from within the monological tradition of western thought, a way of thinking about "truth" that has dominated religion, science, philosophy and literature for many centuries.
In his conception, unknown and unforeseen possibilities arise out of the interaction of autonomous, unfinalized consciousnesses, and this is the true, lived nature of human existence.
[6] The "open-ended dialogue" is the verbal manifestation of this truth, and polyphony is its artistic representation in literary form.
In Dostoevsky's creative process the compositional structure of the novel forms spontaneously around the interactions of this multiplicity of voice-ideas.
From this, no abstract, monological system can emerge, only "a concrete event made up of organized human orientations and voices.
An affirmed idea, one that conforms to the unified worldview expressed through the work, "finds objective expression in a special accent of its own, in its special position within the work as a whole, in the very verbal and stylistic form of its utterance and in a whole series of other infinitely varied means for advancing a thought as a signifying, affirmed thought.
"[4] If the idea falls outside of the author's worldview, it might be polemically repudiated, or it might be reduced to a negative 'attribute' of character, an expression of a finalized psychological or moral 'quality'.
Bakhtin argues that this is not merely a fact of an artistically created world, but is true of "the entire ideological culture of recent times".
The interactions thus provoked are ripe with "event potential": conclusions are not foreordained, nothing truly comes to an end, and no character can be ultimately finalized from without.