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
Okay, so Solaris is fairly plot-less in a lot of important respects, so it doesn't fit super well into any of Booker's plot analyses, since Booker was all about the plot, and Lem is all about the sitting there. What we need is an eighth Basic Booker plot, Waiting Around to Die.
But we've only got the seven of them, so here we go: Voyage and Return.
Anticipation Stage
Kelvin launches off for Solaris in Chapter 1, and is teetering on the edge of something very strange through Chapter 2.
Frustration Stage
In Booker's analysis, a happy dream stage should come first. But Kelvin doesn't really get a chance to enjoy the Solaris weirdness—he's freaked out right from the beginning, when he sees the black woman at the beginning of Chapter 3, and from there, things only get worse, sending us right into the next stage.
Nightmare Stage
Rheya appears to Kelvin, and he ejects her into space in Chapter 5. He learns that she'll be back, though, moving us forward in Booker's trajectory.
Fascination, or Dream Stage
Again, Booker thinks this should come before frustration and nightmare, but Lem is tricky. After his initial panic, Kelvin is enchanted by the idea of having his wife back, and falls in love with the fake Rheya. There are some bumps of course (like when Rheya tries to kill herself), but nonetheless they start thinking about a life together, even planning to go back to Earth (at the beginning of Chapter 13).
Escape and Return
This really doesn't fit Solaris; there's no escape and no return. Instead, the scientists just figure out how to get rid of the visitors, Rheya convinces them to make her disappear, and that's it. Kelvin will go off planet eventually, but at the end of the book he's gone to see the Solaris ocean, where he wishes that Rheya would come back. So it's not so much that he's gotten away as that he wishes he could go back. You might say this is a twist on the classic return.