SOURCE: "Caught in the Dialogic: The Célinian Narrator Silenced," in Modern Language Notes, Vol. 107, No. 4, September, 1992, pp. 795-805.

In the following essay, Silk discusses the effect of cultural alienation on the protagonist's ability to communicate in Journey to the End of the Night.

Introduction

Dialogism's emphasis on an interplay of voices is grounded in Bakhtin's conception of the word as social material. Because "all words have the 'taste' of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour," the notion of a word of one's own becomes impossible. Privacy and the word are incompatible in a way that recalls Geertz's view of culture as a symbolic system that can be characterized by its public nature. Although Bakhtin affirms everywhere in his writings that all words belong to the public domain (this is, after...