Black and White

Ten weeks provide the external framework, but the real chronology is psychological rather than based on events.
It is a sustained consciousness speaking to itself-remembering, imagining, analysing, regretting and anticipating.
The beloved becomes the central object around which the narrator's consciousness revolves. What matters is less what happens between them than what the narrator makes of the relationship.
External circumstances continually provoke internal responses. A small event, memory or perception can expand into a long meditation.
Love, longing, jealousy, hope, disappointment, anxiety, memory and self-questioning overlap rather than appearing as neatly separated episodes.
The prose-poem form allows the narrative to move associatively. One thought generates another, so that memory, present perception and fantasy intermingle.
The "plot" is essentially the movement of consciousness. The reader follows not a sequence of major actions but the changing interpretation of the narrator's situation.
The ten weeks give this apparently circular interior monologue a subtle progression. The narrator may begin with one conception of the beloved or his situation and gradually arrive at another-even if nothing decisive happens externally.
The book's action is the transformation of perception: the loved one is remembered, imagined, desired, interpreted and reinterpreted until the narrator's consciousness itself becomes the principal subject of the work.