Structuralists strive to find the deep structure of a work. There seems to be a certain timelessness to many deep structures, such as the Cinderella narrative. Redone a million times in a million different ways, at its root, Cinderella will always consist of a girl with two evil stepsisters, a stepmom, a dead father, a helper (fairy godmother figure), and a male romantic interest. This is due to structuralists seeking “to understand, in a systematic way, the fundamental structures that underlie all human experience” (Tyson 198). Cinderella works hard her whole life and with a little guidance from others, eventually this hard work pays off and she is able to live happily. Society still holds these ideals in regard to working hard and being rewarded for this work. In class, we discussed that genre can be described as a form of structure, so I’m curious to delve deeper into the evolving structures regarding genre, specifically looking at how similar genres are across age categories.

Courtney Summer’s young adult thriller Sadie fulfills the deeper structures required of a thriller. It contains suspense and cliffhangers. The novel centers around the protagonist Sadie seeking justice for her sister Mattie’s death. However, in a form that I’ve never seen used before in a text, every other chapter is narrated by a radio personality in a podcast format. As part of the text itself, I think structuralists would take into consideration that the form of the text switches between being told from first person to being narrated like a podcast. However, I think the deep structures that structuralists look for would take this form to go one step deeper and use it to reveal how the text fits into the structural form of a thriller. Looking specifically at the age category Sadie is placed in, the text is marketed towards young adults because Sadie herself is a young adult. It also deals with more mature content, in part being that Sadie is actively seeking her sister’s murderer for revenge.

Megan Miranda’s All the Missing Girls is an adult thriller that also fulfills the required deeper structure of a thriller. Like Sadie, All the Missing Girls revolves around a dead girl. However, all of the characters are adults and the suspense is driven by them connecting points of the plot with seemingly unconnected and pivotal points of their childhood. Different from Sadie, a portion of All the Missing Girls is told reverse chronologically: from the past to the present. Just like with Sadie’s form though, structuralists would use this reverse chronology to go deeper into the text and look at how it contributes to making this text a thriller.

What is interesting between these two examples is that due to structuralist’s focusing purely on the underlying structures of a text, these two works can be vastly different in approach to content, form, and audience and yet still contain the same underlying structures that drive them to be thrillers. By removing the text to a certain level, we can see that young adults and adults are in essence reading the same content when they approach a thriller. In the example of these two books, it is suspense surrounding the protagonist in the exploration into the death of another character that is present in the text only in memories.

Works Cited

Miranda, Megan. All the Missing Girls. Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Summers, Courtney. Sadie. Wednesday Books, 2019.

Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today. 3rd ed., Routledge, 2015