Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of multvocality is an idea inevitably invoked in the hypertext genre. The multivocal novel is, "constructed not as the whole of a single consciousness, absorbing other consciousnesses as objects into itself, but as a whole formed by the interaction of several consciousnesses, none of which entirely becomes an object for the other (Landow 18)." The medium of hypertext takes out the voyeuristic quality that one gains in reading literature. No longer is he a third eye looking in, able to gain distance from the text, but rather the reader becomes implicated in the text by the sheer necessity for the reader to interact with the hypertext work. Getting three points of view and actually affecting what you were reading in Family Killed, inevitably roused greated emotion than if you had just read the news paper clipping or the poem at the beginning. Many voices, many consciousnesses comprise the narration of this work. Each lexia becomes one of Derrida's bits, a small chunk of the whole that gets absorbed for what it is on its own and in the context of those things around it. There is a place carved out for the reader to call his own. Suddenly the reader, through his active participation becomes represented within the work itself. Each reader will read the narrative differently, in a different order, or come into the work with a unique background. So the hypertext work is multivocal, different to everyone, multi-faceted, multi-layered, and it changes not only from reader to reader, but also within the same reader as the time of the day changes, or he experiences more things, or any number of variables serve to change the reader's reading of a work everytime he reads it.

---

( cyberspace overview | hypertext overview | hypertext literature overview | go home )