Heteroglossia in Richard Russo’s Empire Falls: A Bakhtinian Exploration

Language is the carrier of human beings’ ideas, and ideologies, and through language a character’s inner thoughts can be revealed. Reading Dostoevsky’s novels, Bakhtin discusses the polyphonic aspect of the novelistic language in what he terms heteroglossia, which has to do with the linguistic diversity a text embraces. This paper aims to examine Heteroglossia or the multiplicity of language or the “Languagedness” (Gardiner 97), in Empire Falls written by the American novelist Richard Russo and published in 2001. The novel is closely read and its heterglossic content is identified and discussed in a way that sheds light on the sources of the Russo’s novel, language, and narrative techniques of its author. Results emerge to prove the highly significant role of heteroglossia or multilingualism in the narrative construction of Empire Falls and the advancement of its themes and motifs.