Edouard Dujardin’s novel Les lauriers sont coupés is especially known for introducing the interior monologue (stream of consciousness) into literature and for having inspired James Joyce. Many other qualities of this short but highly complex and dense text have yet to be thoroughly fathomed. The present article re-evaluates Les lauriers sont coupés beyond the interior monologue by analyzing its particular relationship to French décadentisme, its use of religious symbolism, the psychological exploration of the triviality of everyday life, the parodic play with intertextuality (petrarchism), and the latent intermediality inspired by Richard Wagner’s concept of the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’.