Framing Those Multiple Voices

Hey peoples!  I started something like this in class when I dealt with the term "frame/frame story" and I liked where that was going so I shall continue with it and make you guys suffer through it some more here.  Because I am sinister.  Indeed.

Anyway, from the Bakhtin reading it can be gathered that the general meaning of heteroglossia is the presence of a multiplicity of voices in a written work, or in this case, the novel.  Then there is the idea stated at the near opening of the reading that language is not unitary, and it only comes close to being unitary in a novel because "For the novelist, there is not world outside his socio-heterglot perception... Therefore it is possible to have, even in the novel, that profound but unique unity of a language"(330).  So the unity of language that can appear in the novel can only be unified because it comes from one mind (the author) and is captured in that fictional universe, I suppose, and that could make the statement that the author, the author's mind, and the fictional confines of that multiplicity of voices to the book itself are what the "frame" for heteroglossia consists of.  If the content, style and language are all one in the novel, as Bakhtin said on the first page, then does the frame consist of what I have just listed?  And the big question; does heteroglossia need this "frame", or a frame of some kind, to exist?  If heteroglossia is the existence of a multiplicity of voices in a piece of written work, does it not need those confines, that frame set-up?

When I connect "frame" with the existence of heteroglossia, I immediately think of the multiplicity of voices that the author creates in the novel through the many characters.  Those characters all came from the same mind, the same writer, and yet they all express different opinions and thoughts and social groups.  All of those voice came from that one source, and that authorial source is the "frame".  For instance, Bakhtin says the heteroglossia in the novel is "another's speech in another's language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way" (324).  By authorial intentions, he means showing opinions, moral values, whatever the author wants to show.  The most basic example I can think of being to show people, indirectly of course if done well, what's good and what's bad, not just in the author's opinion but the opinion of their society at the time (social critique anyone?) and that's where the multiplicity of voices comes in.  But because the author has to use many voices to tell the reader these things (the antagonist, the protagonist, various other characters) is the author's mind not the "frame" of heteroglossia in the novel?

Sorry if I seemed to jump around a bit, but my main question I shall explicitly pose connects the frame the the author to the heteroglossia of the novel.  What is the "frame" of the novel, is it the fact that it came from one mind, or that all the heteroglossia of the novel can only exist specifically in the confines of that fictional world?  Does heteroglossia need a frame to exist?  If it really does refer to the multiplicity of voices in one novel, doesn't that oneness of the novel have to exist for the heteroglossia to be possible?  What frame does it need?  I think it's that all of these voices came from the author's one mind, but what else could it be?