HIDDEN SILENCE AND DIALOGUE: BAKHTINIAN DIALOGICS IN MILAN KUNDERA’S IDENTITY

The purpose of the present research is to display Milan Kundera’s literary techniques in showing the capacity of silence in transforming its conventional form, so that it would be hidden under different masks, and not to be recognized as silence, regarding Mikail Bakhtin’s dialogics. The main focus of this paper is to display the different forms of silence in Kundera’s novel Identity. Since silence is not limited to the moments of muteness, it would be discussed that according to Bakhtin’s Dialogics, hysterical repeating, overpowering, talkativeness, and writing anonymous letters, may be included as transformed forms of silence. Also it would be discussed that dialogue, in the Bakhtinian sense of the word, may be occurred during someone’s interior monologues. On a larger scale, it reveals that because of different mechanisms at work, and because of the complexities which can be entered into the novel, not only dialogue and silence, but also the reality trespasses the presupposed mental frameworks.