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.
