To portray Kelly Kelleher’s final moments, Oates employs a fragmented, non-linear narrative structure rooted in literary modernism. Pioneered by authors like Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando) and William Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom, “A Rose for Emily”), this style often uses stream of consciousness and a fractured timeline to reflect a character’s internal psychological state over external events. Oates adapts this technique to simulate the experience of trauma. Some research in psychology posits that traumatic memories are experienced as disjointed sensory fragments, flashbacks, and intense emotions. The novel’s structure directly mirrors this concept, beginning in medias res with the crash and then cycling recursively through Kelly’s thoughts as she’s trapped in the sinking car.

Black Water employs this narrative structure to cycle through and beyond Kelly’s death, joining a literary tradition that suspends time at the moment of death to allow for a deeper existential examination. Seminal texts that explore this idea include Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1890) and Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886), while more recent examples include Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain” (1995) and Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (2019). While Kelly is dying, the narrative constantly circles back to the moment of impact, interrupting itself with memories of Kelly’s childhood, her romantic past, and the events of the Fourth of July party leading up to the accident. This structure forces the reader to inhabit Kelly’s mental state of shock and disorientation, marked by “[p]atches of amnesia like white paint spilling into her brain” (10). By abandoning a chronological plot, Oates shifts the narrative’s focus from the political scandal—the public story of The Senator—to the private, psychological horror of the victim. This literary choice allows Oates to give a voice and interior life to the historically silenced figure of Mary Jo Kopechne.