Chapters 11 and 12, the story of David and Bathsheba and its immediate aftermath, are the great turning-point of the whole David story, as both Meir Sternberg (The Poetics of Biblical Narrative [Bloomington, 1985]) and Robert Polzin (David and the Deuteronomist [Blossmington, 1993]) have duly observed; and it seems as though the writer has pulled out all the stopls of his remarkable narrative art in order to achieve a brilliant realization of this crucially pivotal episode. The deployment of thematic keywords, the shifting play of dialogue, the intricate relation between instructions and their exection, the cultivated ambiguities of motive, are orchestrated with a richness that scarcely has an equal in ancient narrative. Though the analytic scholare have variously sought to break up these chapters into editoral frame and Succession Narrative, Prophetic compoistion and old source, emending patches of the text as they proceed, such efforts are best passed over in silence, for the powerful literary integrity of the text speaks for itself.
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R. Alter (1999) studied this question.