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. According to Dujardin, the idea was to represent a character's thoughts as directly as possible, with the least possible mediation from an author—thoughts were to be represented as if they were a monologue directed at no one, and the author was not to comment on any of it. Syntax was of no concern, since the thoughts were to be as close as possible to the character's unconscious. 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. The question of narrative technique (also called "Unframed Direct Interior Monologue", or UDIM) remains a matter of some critical discussion. In addition, between French and English there is some confusion regarding the technical terminology: in French, "monologue intérieur" means both "stream of consciousness" and "interior monologue"; the latter, it is suggested, could be seen as an extreme version of the former precluding, for instance, multiple viewpoints (such multiplicity is rejected by Dujardin). Though the invention of the stream of consciousness technique is frequently ascribed to Dujardin, from the 1920s to the 1950s there was considerable discussion about Dujardin's claim, though it was supported by James Joyce and Joyce's friend and translator Valery Larbaud in the 1920s, even before Dujardin made those very claims in "Le Monologue intérieur". There were other candidates as well: Elizabeth Drew, in 1926, proposed Dorothy Richardson, and Katherine Gerould, in 1927, Henry James. In addition, passages from Fyodor Dostoyevsky are sometimes cited as precursors, passages which Dujardin attempted to differentiate from his own writing.