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Herman Melville's agonized internal dialogues in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) recall Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the "relativizing of linguistic consciousness"--the play of multiple voices within a single text. (1) Especially remarkable is the way that Melville's collection refuses to capitulate to any easy emotional or intellectual reaction to the American Civil War. Throughout the work, a full range of rhetorical response to the conflict is on display. Melville's collection not only resists reducing events to the limited views of partisan ideology, but it also engages readers in a confrontation with the problem of interpreting historical events, in particular the traumatic battles of the war. Although, as Melville makes clear in the supplementary...
