NARRATIVE COMPLEXITY AND THEORIES OF POLYPHONY IN THE NOVELS OF MARIO VARGAS LLOSA

Abstract

This article analyzes the interrelation between the theories of narrative complexity and polyphony in the works of Mario Vargas Llosa. Based on the novels “The Time of the Hero” and “The Feast of the Goat”, the study explores the writer’s narrative strategies, his methods of constructing multilayered structures, and creating polyphonic discourse. The author connects Vargas Llosa’s artistic experience with the theories of Gérard Genette, Brian McHale, Wolf Schmid, and Mikhail Bakhtin, forming a scholarly framework for understanding narrative and ideological complexity.

The article examines such formal elements as the variability of time and point of view, the unreliable narrator, interior monologue, and stream of consciousness, demonstrating their intrinsic connection with the polyphonic nature of the novels. Furthermore, based on Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism and heteroglossia, the study analyzes how various social and political voices collide in Vargas Llosa’s works, how “truth” is represented as multiple, and how the absence of a final moral position contributes to this multiplicity.

The results of the study show that for Vargas Llosa, narrative complexity is not merely a formal experiment but a structural expression of a polyphonic worldview. Through the dialogue between diverse voices, his novels reveal political, moral, and philosophical issues, making him one of the foremost representatives of multi-voiced realism in contemporary literature.