Fruits of Repentance and Sweets of Liberty; Polyphonic voices in the Memoirs of Steven Burroughs

I have taken to reading Bakhtin after reading Steven Burrough’s narrative, and therefore, when I ran across an interesting passage, I was stumped about whether it was technically a polyphonic voice. The text appears page 171, and immediately I noticed something unique about Burrough’s voice. In this passage he reports the story about the dollar and the rum for the men while at Castle Island (pictured at right). [I found his determination to divide the rum equally as well as some other things he said as pre-Marxists, but that is another post.] Mount “told [Cushing], that Burroughs had kept the money himself, and the other prisoners had received nothing.” These were paraphrased words by Burroughs, but Burroughs does not refer to himself as “me," but as “himself,” as Mount would have done. Also, the story contradicts SB’s, but I found it odd that SB resisted the urge to say “Mount lied and told him that . . .” But Burroughs simply states his story then Mont’s (even though it is paraphrased) without prejudice. Burroughs continues to state that Cushing tells an alternate story to Mr. May, he,

related, that he had given three dollars to Burroughs, for the prisoners, and that Burroughs, had appropriated them to his own use, refusing to participate with any others in the benefit of the money. Mr. May entered with warmth into the subject, and when he saw me, expostulated upon the impropriety of my conduct. . . . (171)

 In this section, Burroughs again retells the story, keeping polyphonic voices by referring to his self as “Burroughs,” as Cushing would have done, rather than “me.” Also, Mr. May’s voice comes through in the phrase “impropriety of my conduct.” Even though in this instance he does use the pronoun “me,” we can hear May’s voice in choice words such as “impropriety” and “conduct.”


According to Vice, the polyphonic novel is one that is “multi-accented and contradictory in its values” (Vice 123). Furthermore, she notes that “a possible image of polyphony would be a church, ‘a communion of unmerged souls, where sinners and righteous men come together" (Bakhtin, PDP 26; Vice 123).  This image really helped me to understand polyphony.  These polyphonic voices are contradictory in their values, and SB’s narrative seems to allow freedom of other’s contradictory voices into his narrative. Other instances also include the Turk and the Venetian slave story (163), the voices he relates of others through the quoted text, and the various inserted letters (I could argue the veracity of his wife’s).

At this point, I have to note Burroughs’ manipulation of text by his selection of inserting letters into his text out of chronological order, which I thought odd.

Pg 172: letter from Ebenezer Davis (brother-in-law) to SB (April 20th, 1788)

Pg 173: letter from Jonathan Davis to SB (May 12th, 1788)

Pg 173: letter from parents to SB (October 16th, 1787)

Pg 175: letter from SB to parents (November 27th, 1787)

By placing the uncles’ letters before the parents, Burroughs makes it appear that the uncles enduced the parents to write and that the uncles care more about his wellbeing than his own parents, thus eliciting sympathy. Also, the letter from his parents chastises him for his conduct as well as his attempt to gain freedom, while the uncle’s are more positive; Davis even reports about hearing of his good conduct. Davis uses the term “the sweets of liberty,” which appears in stark contrast to the parent’s “fruits of repentance” (173-174). I believe that by placing the parents last, SB causes us to remember their lack of faith in their son and therefore we pity him all the more.

While SB manipulates these polyphonic voices to his own gain, his voice is likewise manipulated by editors post 1811. While one might think that Burroughs is the author of his own text, the appearance in 1811 of edited footnotes disrupts the notion of author. Thereafter, Burroughs’ voice appears, it seems, at the will of the editor. His voice is frequently questioned by the editor and author of the footnotes, and his voice is shortened by a later abridged version of the narrative. These subsequent editors appear to have usurped Burroughs’ voice and manipulated his identity in order to present his story the way they felt it should be presented. In short, the editor becomes the author and Burroughs becomes one of the many narrators (who is subjected to the narrator of the footnotes).

Other than my notes about voice and authorship, I enjoyed reading Burroughs’ story; I can understand why it would be entertaining--there is something Huck Finn'ish in this telling.  Moreover, he had a flair for leadership; look at how he rallied prisoners to revolt. He was quite clever in arguing and presenting his case, particularly his distinction of molestation in “open” spaces, which he argues were “private.” It is obvious from his narrative that he is an articulate man and one cannot help wondering how far he would have gone if he had stayed in school and not got into trouble. Perhaps that is the lesson children are to read into the text, but, to me, it is heavily veiled in “three-stooges” like comedy and Socratic rhetorical tragedy. Tragedy and Comedy, a carnivalesque notion indeed!

Works Cited
Burroughs, Stephen. Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs (1798). Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988.

Vice, Sue. Introducing Bakhtin. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997.