We come into consciousness speaking a language already permeated with many voices—a social, not a private language. From the beginning, we are 'polyglot,' already in process of mastering a variety of social dialects derived from parents, clan, class, religion, country. We grow in consciousness by taking in more voices as 'authoritatively persuasive' and then by learning which to accept as 'internally persuasive.' Finally we achieve, if we are lucky, a kind of individuality, but it is never a private or autonomous individuality in the western sense,; except when we maim ourselves arbitrarily to monologue, we always speak a chorus of languages. Anyone who has not been maimed by some imposed 'ideology in the narrow sense,' anyone who is not an 'ideologue,' respects the fact that each of us is a 'we,' not an 'I.' Polyphony, the miracle of our 'dialogical' lives together, is thus both a fact of life, and, in its higher reaches, a value to be pursued endlessly.
Wayne C. Booth, from the Introduction to Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics
