Contrastive Dialogue, Persuasive Dialogue, and Polyphonic Dialogue

There are many classification of Dialogues. In this blog let me mention three of them as following:

A. Contrastive Dialogue:

There are at times dialogues are contrastive in nature. Two characters talking in a contrastive manner is called contrastive dialogue. For example, when Jesus predicts that Peter will deny Jesus Christ he says he will never deny Him but he will even die with him (Matt 26:35; Mark 14:31). Here Peter’s views are kept in contrast to Jesus. Jesus is not convincing Peter about it. He was just narrating what will happen. But Peter negates that and says he will never deny Jesus. This shows contrastive ideas kept side by side.

B. Persuasive Dialogue:

The term persuasive dialogue is coined by the present writer to mean one or more persuasive ideas present in the dialogue. In many instances, like Socratic dialogues, one character’s speech would persuade the other character(s). For example, in the dialogue of Nicodemus in John 3, Jesus’ speech persuades Nicodemus to accept his understanding about being ‘born again.’ The whole persuasion in this dialogue is that Nicodemus should understand that to be born again he must know that Jesus is sent from God as the Son of God and that he must believe in Him and that through this believing he will have eternal life. Therefore, Jesus’ participation in the dialogue in 3:1-21 is to persuade Nicodemus to believe in Him. This is a common feature in dialogues.

C. Polyphonic Dialogue:

Polyphonic dialogue is also a term used by present writer nevertheless it is a rendering of Bakhtin’s idea of polyphony. For Bakhtin, polyphony means many voices (see below). Then, polyphonic dialogue is nothing but a dialogue which contains many voices where no voice is preferred over the other voices. In polyphonic dialogue each character’s ideologies are presented while none is subordinated, even the author’s or the hero’s.