Analysis Of Jennifer Egan's 'A Visit From The Goon Squad'

I absolutely love Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. Each short story is packed with emotion and follows the same underlying theme: the consequence of time. Egan’s stories shift back and forth through time and show the connection between each of the characters. There is never a dull or boring moment because the reader is constantly trying to figure out where exactly he or she is: in time, in place, and in what character’s perspective. The way in which she writes her collection seems to mimic real life. People enter into each other’s lives with no prior knowledge as to what has happened in the past, and people leave each other’s lives with no knowledge as to what will happen in the future. This collection has given me new writing

Rather than having to create completely new characters from scratch for every short story, I think that it would be beneficial to come up with a few, fully fleshed out characters and put them in various different circumstances. Even if this doesn’t end up giving me a novel of connected short stories, this strategy will easily provide me with at least one solid short story. Working with the same characters and writing them into new circumstances will eventually land me on a story that feels right. I will already have the foundation for the story before I even begin, then it’s just a matter of trying out different

By the end of the collection, I was pretty devastated. The young, beautiful, exuberant characters that I began reading about had grown up before my eyes. Some of them were dead, some of them were married with children, almost none of their lives turned out the way they had hoped or planned. The transitions felt real and believable; I almost didn’t want to continue reading at certain points because I knew things could never stay as perfect as they felt in those fleeting moments of bliss. One example of this is when Rolph and Charlie dance together at the end of “Safari”. For a moment, the reader is there with them, dancing, knowing and not knowing that this is the best life will get. The reader is allowed a brief glimpse of the future and in that moment we find out that Rolph goes on to commit suicide seventeen years later. This moment of bliss with the underlying tension of the passage of time encapsulates the theme of the