Structuralism Applied to Literature--Narratologists and Culler's "Structuralist Poetics"

        You would use Narratology or Structuralist Poetics to discover the deep structure rules which the text's characters and their actions express, much like the anthropologist studying children on a playground can begin to infer rules for behavior in their games from the kids' repeated gestures and sayings.  The first step always involves determining what binary oppositions are necessary to describe the text, and which of those are privileged (+ below) and which are what Raman Selden calls "privitive," or un-privileged (- below).  Then try to imagine the rules that operate those binaries in the text.  Your paper's thesis would explain how one or more of those rules work in the text, and perhaps, how readers respond to the rules you explain.  If this is not working for you on any particular work, try Northrop Frye's seasonal-generic "modes" or the generic "master plot" analysis of the work.