Abstract

Traditionally, Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of dialogism has been discussed only in terms of the dialogue among different individual characters. However, Bakhtin acknowledges the dialogism not only between conflicting individual perspectives but also within a single individual's consciousness. Bakhtin calls these conflicting perspectives "internal dialogism." The idea of "internal dialogism" is germane to the study of a first-person narrative, especially a narrative in an autobiographical form. This type of narrative has never been studied by the Bakhtinians, because, in this narrative, the narrator's voice seemingly dominates, and therefore tends to subsume other voices. In this respect, application of "internal dialogism" to first-person narratives advances Bakhtin's idea to a general theory of the novel, one which can be applied to the seemingly "monological" novel as well as to the "dialogical" novel. ;Bakhtin's idea of internal dialogism can be applied to Dickens' novels in an autobiographical form, such as David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and, to a lesser extent, Bleak House. In these novels, the narrator/hero's consciousness is not unitary but always double-voiced. Of these novels, David Copperfield is most internally dialogic, because the novel's dialogism occurs mainly inside David's consciousness. Behind David's centering discourse, which records the positive bourgeois life of self-reliance, there exists a decentering counter-discourse, which continually suggests an idle, self-indulgent bourgeois life. Like David Copperfield, Great Expectations is characterized by an interplay of centering and decentering discourse, which reveals the contradictory elements in Pip's development. The novel also contains more socially distinctive voices than David Copperfield, voices which are not subsumed under the narrator's voice. Dialogism in Bleak House is multi-dimensional. First, the novel has two narrators---Esther Summerson and the third-person narrator---who provide two contradictory social views. Second, each narrator's discourse is internally dialogic in that it contains some contradictory elements that correspond to the other narrator's views. Third, various socially powerful voices emanating from other characters make the novel's heteroglossia dynamic. These Dickens novels demonstrate that not only the dialogism among characters but also the internal dialogism embodied in the narrators' self-representation contributes to Bakhtinian heteroglossia