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Articles

Volume 20, Number 1 (1995)

Diminishing Voice in Buckler's The Mountain and the Valley

  • John C. Van Rys
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1995-01-01

Abstract

Buckler's protagonist, David, in The Mountain and the Valley, suffers from an inability to hear correctly the polyphonic world of the valley people and his surroundings, generate his own voice, and enter into a dialogue with those around him. As David grows older, he silences himself and withdraws into isolation, in search of transcendence through a non-existent meta-language divorced from the dialogue of life. He chooses to suspend time, to exit the temporal-spatial world, the heteroglot world that Bakhtin describes and this novel explores.