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Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Everything Is Illuminated, is a Bakhtinian
dream; the novel’s structure allows its words to become a chorus of
voices working together to form one story. The function of this chorus
can best be understood by literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of
“heteroglossia” (Bakhtin 1079). In his innovative essay, “Discourse on
the Novel,” Bakhtin argues that artful novels should possess a multitude
of voices which interact in dialogue to create meaning. The structure of
Everything Is Illuminated lends itself to a Bakhtinian interpretation because
its tri-narrative structure creates a unique situation in which multiple
narrators work together to create the whole of the novel. Foer employs
heteroglossia to bring us to the conclusion that the events of the
novel form a collective experience unable to be communicated without a
chorus of many voices.
The novel is composed of multiple narrative structures, what Bakhtin
calls “compositional-stylistic unities,” allowing for what at times seems an
infinite number of character voices (Bakhtin 1078). Bakhtin writes that in
a novel, “form and content in discourse are one,” and “the style of a novel
is to be found in the combination of its styles; the language of a novel is
the system of its ‘languages’” (1078). These languages are composed of
the voices of the narrators and characters. Bakhtin also emphasizes that
each stylistic unity found within a novel is equally important, and that it
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