Devouring Time: A Study of the Narrative Time in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad

Abstract

Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer-prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad conceives of time as a brutalizing force which ravages characters who wonder where time went. The novel calls attention to readers’ own experience of time passing. Order, duration, frequency; time passed and time regained; time’s forward march and memory’s backward loops: these are the recurring preoccupations of this novel. However, most academic researches focus on the author’s interviews, thematic analysis, and the novel’s postmodernist characteristics etc. Based on Gérard Genette’s theory of the narrative time, this article studies how Egan demonstrates the theme of the “passage of time” in her writing through a deliberate arrangement of the narrative time.