A system and method can support intra-node communication based on a shared memory queue. A transactional middleware machine can provide a complex structure with a plurality of blocks in the shared memory, wherein the shared memory is associated with one or more communication peers, and wherein the communication peers include a sender and a receiver of a message that includes the complex structure. Furthermore, the sender can link a head block of the complex structure to a shared memory queue associated with the receiver, wherein the head block is selected from the plurality of blocks in the complex structure. Then, the receiver can access the complex structure based on the head block of the complex structure.