Heteroglossia in Text and Creation of Novel Discourses: A Case study of Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum

This work is an attempt to investigate the possibility of creating narrative and extra-narrative discourses using Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum. In this context, through Bakhtin’s heteroglossia and carnivalesque, the ambiguous and irresponsible narrative of the novel’s narrator-cum-protagonist is analyzed. Although it is indisputable that Grass, as the author, is strongly vocalized in his novel in the guise of the story characters, full weight is here given to the heteroglossia produced by unreliability and grotesqueness of the protagonist’s expressions. Besides, this study has examined the method and extent of absorbing the discourse of Otherness into social and historical stylistics of the Self. Besides, it is proposed that any text might be subversive due to its carnival potentialities against logocentric discourses and its ability in breaking cultural barriers and revitalizing its diachronic and synchronic affinities with other subsystems. Therefore, the repressed voices can gain an opportunity for negotiating with patriarchal powers, and more importantly they can reclaim their autonomy by realizing their internal and external requirements. It is hypothesized that different textual utterances – no matter from what system of power they come – enter a nesting, floating, and multilevel matrix of discourse formation that is textually multivalent and contextually generative.