Polyphony

Polyphony is a quality in fiction where several characters' viewpoints carry genuine, independent authority, so the novel stages a real argument between them rather than settling it on the author's behalf.

The term comes from the critic Mikhail Bakhtin, writing about Dostoevsky in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929). His claim was that Dostoevsky's characters are not mouthpieces for their author: Ivan Karamazov's case against God is made as powerfully as it can be made, and the novel never quietly overrules him. The book is a conversation that stays unfinished.

Polyphony is not the same thing as multiple points of view. A thriller can rotate through six narrators and still be what Bakhtin called monologic, because every one of them is bent toward a single conclusion the author reached before chapter one. Polyphony asks something harder: that the position you disagree with be given its strongest form.

It is a useful idea in revision. If a multi-viewpoint manuscript feels flat despite plenty of incident, check whether any character is ever allowed to be right about something the protagonist is wrong about. If the answer is no, the viewpoints are decoration — the reader is hearing one voice in several costumes.