Steps represents Kosinski's most radical experimentation with the form of the novel. Here he dispenses with any kind of plot in the Aristotelian sense, as well as any chronological sequence. Kosinski links this approach with the modern artists' desire "to show time as we perceive it, experience as we absorb it. The shaping mind is at the center of the work and guides the work as it evolves." Steps consists of thirty-five seemingly disconnected episodes related by the narrator as observing participant. He has been compared to a camera eye ranging over scenes of cruelty and brutality that he has witnessed or dispassionately recollecting his own activities. The author has interspersed among these episodes fourteen italicized dialogues between the narrator and the young woman currently his lover. In their discussion of matters involving their relationship, the two explore the problem of how the self relates to others while...