[3] The novel's plot is purposely underdeveloped, as Dujardin acknowledged in a later essay on his novel and its technique, Le Monologue intérieur (1931) and especially in a letter written a year after the novel's publication.
[3] It concerns a naive and amorous student, Daniel Prince, who is about to be taken in by an actress, Lea d'Arsay, whose only interest is his money.
As the novel develops, Prince daydreams of proposing the actress to elope with him, and when he is in her apartment, before they are to take an evening stroll, he falls asleep and dreams of his past, of his parents and the first girl he fell in love with.
Lawrence Edward Bowling points out that Dujardin's arguments actually covered a wide range of possible interiority, since the character's words are at the same time almost-conscious speech as well as almost-unconscious unordered thought.
Bowling distinguishes between "stream of consciousness" and "interior monologue" and finds both in the novel; the former, he says, occurs clearly and most perfectly in a dream sequence (when "the mind drops below the level of language usage and functions by means of pure images and sensations"), but much of the other material in the novel is thought turned so consciously into language that it is far from unmediated.
[4] The question of narrative technique (also called "Unframed Direct Interior Monologue", or UDIM) remains a matter of some critical discussion.