"Maldoror" is a modular work primarily divided into six parts, or cantos; these parts are further subdivided into a total of sixty chapters, or verses. Parts one through six consist of fourteen, sixteen, five, eight, seven and ten chapters, respectively. With some exceptions, most chapters consist of a single, lengthy paragraph. The text often employs very long, unconventional and confusing sentences which, together with the dearth of paragraph breaks, may suggest a stream of consciousness, or automatic writing. Over the course of the narrative, there is often a first-person narrator, although some areas of the work instead employ a third-person narrative. The book's central character is Maldoror, a figure of evil who is sometimes directly involved in a chapter's events, or else revealed to be watching at a distance. Depending on the context of narrative voice in a given place, the first-person narrator may be taken to be Maldoror himself, or sometimes not. The confusion between narrator and character may also suggest an unreliable narrator.