Christopher Booker is a scholar who wrote that every story falls into one of seven basic plot structures: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, the Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, and Rebirth. Shmoop explores which of these structures fits this story like Cinderella’s slipper.
Plot Type : Voyage and Return
Rebirth
A young hero or heroine falls under the shadow of the dark power.
Okay, so the hero and heroine aren't actually all that young. Joe and Violet are both fifty, and they both fall under the spell of a dark power called The Past. Although Jazz is nonlinear, and we don't actually see their torrid relationship or their own personal histories until well into the novel, they're both kind of drowning in everything that’s come before the book opens.
Violet's family has a history of mental illness. Her mother committed suicide, and this messed her up so badly that she doesn't have any kids. But, just to make things tough, she starts getting baby-crazy around forty and then she starts going actually crazy. Joe struggles with abandonment issues because his mother left him at birth. By age fifty, Violet's craziness activates Joe's scared-little-boy tendencies (Where's mama?) and the past starts to get oppressive.
For a while, all may seem to go reasonably well. The threat may even seem to have receded.
Both Joe and Violet find pretty good bandaids for the psychological oppression of history. Violet starts carrying a doll (eek) and throws herself into hairdressing—she also goes mute to insure that she doesn't say anything nutso. Joe starts carrying on with Dorcas, reclaiming his youthful vitality and finding someone that will nurture him a little bit. It's not a perfect fix, but it does well for a few months.
But eventually it approaches again in full force until the hero or heroine is seen imprisoned in the state of living death.
Ugh, okay: Now all the terrible stuff happens. Dorcas leaves Joe, which makes his abandonment issues soar into the stratosphere. He stalks around New York with a gun, trying to find Dorcas but also thinking about trying to find his mother. When he does find Dorcas, he shoots her and she dies.
Violet loses it and bum-rushes Dorcas's open casket at the funeral, trying to slice up her face. Then she lets all of her pet birds out of their cages. Jeepers. The Trace household becomes a contender for Most Depressing Household Ever for a few months.
This continues for a long time. When it seems that the dark power has completely triumphed…
This is where the book starts: with the Trace apartment a grim spectacle of broken dreams and empty birdcages and a photograph of Dorcas on the mantelpiece. Joe and Violet take turns waking up in the middle of the night and going to stare at the picture and be super depressed.
But finally comes the miraculous redemption: either, where the imprisoned figure is a heroine; or, where it is the hero, by a Young Woman or a Child.
To start this redemption-fest, Violet makes the weird move of going to see Dorcas's aunt Alice. She opens up to Alice and starts thinking of Dorcas as a daughter-figure rather than the trollop who stole her husband. Alice also reminds Violet of her grandmother True Belle, which helps her think fondly of her past—and with this, she starts to get her shattered psyche back into fighting form.
Then along comes Felice, Dorcas's bestie. She comes into the Trace household and talks about how bad Dorcas was to Joe. Joe is able to talk about Dorcas and free himself from his depression, while Violet is able to dote on Felice like a daughter and remember that young women aren't evil. To tie it up with a bow, some nice jazz music comes through the open window and they all dance together.
The Trace household is happy again, and Violet and Joe talk about the past to each other, signaling that they have decided to make friends with their histories rather than think of their histories as Boogeymen hiding under the bed.