A Symphony of Four Voices: Schizophrenic, Poetic, Grotesque, and Reader Voices in Can Xue’s “Skylight”

Abstract: This article interrogates Can Xue’s short story “Skylight” through Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, identifying four intersecting registers—schizophrenic, poetic, grotesque, and reader voices—that together form a narrative “symphony.” Drawing on clinical psychiatry, cultural history, and aesthetic theory, the article argues that the narrator’s hallucination-like monologue reflects both literal schizophrenic symptomatology and the social stigma surrounding mental illness in post-Mao China. Poetic digressions introduce sensory lyricism that destabilizes linear prose, while grotesque bodily imagery contests Socialist Realist norms and echoes Daoist ideas of metamorphosis. The text’s radical fragmentation obliges readers to stage these voices internally; using Bourdieu’s habitus and cognitive accounts of inner speech, the essay frames reading as a socially inflected, quasi-auditory performance. By dispersing narrative authority across competing discourses, “Skylight” collapses the boundaries between metaphor and embodiment, sanity and madness, rendering the act of reading itself a site of embodied, polyphonic resistance.