[4][5] Bakhtin introduces a number of key concepts, such as polyphony and carnivalisation, to elucidate what he saw as unique in Dostoevsky's literary art.
[7] In consequence, it is argued that attempts to expound Dostoevsky's novels from any sort of monological critical perspective will always fail to penetrate them.
[11] According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky is not interested in characters as individuals or social types occupying a specific place in the author's universe, where who or what they are is fixed, defined, and limited by certain 'objective' qualities.
"[12] Dostoevsky thus carries out a kind of "Copernican revolution" in fiction by making subjectivity and self-consciousness the basis for a character's exposition, so that even the functions usually reserved for the author or narrator (descriptions, characterisations, definitions, etc) are transferred into the field of vision of the character themselves: "the author no longer illuminates the hero's reality but the hero's self-consciousness.
There is an "artistic fusion" of personal life and worldview that strengthens the integrity of self-signification in the face of the myriad forms of external definition.
[16] The idea, as Dostoevsky understood it, is not some sort of entity residing within a person's head, it is a "live event" played out in the realm of inter-subjectivity.
[18] Bakhtin argues that dialogic interactions of the kind found in Dostoevsky are not reducible to forms that are studiable by linguistics and can only be understood as discourse.
[26] According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky always wrote in opposition to currents of thought that turn human beings into objects (scientific, economic, social, psychological, etc.
), enclosing them in an alien web of definition and causation, robbing them of freedom and responsibility: "He saw in it a degrading reification of a person's soul, a discounting of its freedom and its unfinalizability... Dostoevsky always represents a person on the threshold of a final decision, at a moment of crisis, at an unfinalizable, and unpredeterminable, turning point for their soul.
Carnivalization is the translation of these essential qualities into the literary realm, beginning with the ancient seriocomic genres, such as Socratic Dialogue and Menippean Satire, and reaching its highest point in the novels of Rabelais and Dostoevsky.
The concept suggests an ethos where normal hierarchies, social roles, proper behaviors and assumed truths are subverted in favor of the "joyful relativity" of free participation in the festival.
[28] Carnival, through its temporary dissolution or reversal of conventions, generates the 'threshold' situations where disparate individuals come together and express themselves on an equal footing, without the oppressive constraints of social objectification: the usual preordained hierarchy of persons and values becomes an occasion for laughter, its absence an opportunity for creative interaction.
"[31] Bakhtin emphasizes that the carnival mode of being and thinking is not based in abstraction, but in a creative participation in the intensities of real life.
Bakhtin discusses the development of Menippean satire from its origins in ancient Greece with the Cynic satirist Menippus and examines its essential characteristics.
These characteristics include intensified comicality, freedom from established constraints, bold use of fantastic situations for the testing of truth, abrupt changes, inserted genres and multi-tonality, parodies, oxymorons, scandal scenes, inappropriate behaviour, and a sharp satirical focus on contemporary ideas and issues.
[36] He notes its unparalleled capacity for reflecting the social and philosophical ethos of its ancient historical setting – principally the epoch of the decline of national legend, which brought with it the gradual dissolution of long-established ethical norms and a concomitant rise in free interaction and argumentation over all manner of "ultimate questions".
In polyphony, the dialogical freedom of Menippean satire is taken to a new and more profound level: character voices are liberated from the finalizing and monologizing influence of authorial control, much as the participants in carnival revel in the temporary dissolution of authoritarian social definitions and established truths, allowing a new type of "purely human" dialogue to emerge.