Like so many of Robbe-Grillet's novels, The Erasers is circular in structure; the murder, which allegedly took place at the beginning, setting the events of the novel in motion, in fact takes place at the end. The novel is more "ordered," chronologically, than later works; but, despite the classical twenty-four-hour span of the novel, the reader's sense of time is disordered, subverted by the number of flashbacks, memories, repetitions of scenes, imagined occurrences.

Consistent with his theories on "etrela des chases" (the "being-there" of things) and his refusal to appropriate them as symbols in the Balzacian sense, Robbe-Grillet presents object and idea as co-existent, without postulating a necessary, symbolic connection between the two; indeed, the novel takes pains to "erase" any symbolic link by mocking or negating it as it occurs.