Jennifer Eagan Predictions Chapter 3

Time period and contextual significance – The time period is significant because of all of the conflict that is happening. The conflict that is going on in Germany affectsn many characters in the book.

Rarely does a person come across a book with alternating points of view, an endless stream of characters, and powerpoint slides. Yet, all of those different structures intertwine within the novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Without its structure the novel would be unremarkable. The ever-switching points of view and types of prose carry the different perspectives of the main characters, and the division of the book into two sections symbolizes the flip sides of their lives. Ultimately, the structure unravels as its own character, which illustrates the main theme of the novel, that time is a goon tied to music.

Time is constant. No one has the power to stop it or to go back in it. Time cannot be changed for it is timeless. With time being everlasting there is a mystery within time’s boarders; why cannot one change time? Arcadia by Tom Stoppard explores the lives of many individuals in two different time periods but within the same setting, Sidley Park, which is a stately home. Within the first four scenes of the play there is a shift between the two time periods 1809 and contemporary time period. Time is omnipresent throughout the play, whatever happens will happen and time is constant regardless how you measure it. In Geraldine Cousin’s Playing for Time, Cousin explores the mystery of time’s immutability. She also explores the ideas of how the past always has a lingering effect on the future. Then in John Fleming’s Tom Stoppard’s: Arcadia compliments on how time is equally woven between the past and present. He also provokes the idea that one could split the play into two plays by splitting up the two times. The mystery behind time in Stoppard’s Arcadia is well defined. Time is inevitable and connected, you cannot have the past without the present and future. Tom Stoppard depicts that tie overlaps itself in order to show how chaos enables freewill.

This kind of manipulation of time is different than the previous, because time is not actually stopped, only slowed. This is perhaps to make the reader feel the impact of the moment more fully - even if it was only a short one.

She started to see something in her eyes that was not there before.

Whether it be Rhea, Bennie’s high school friend, who would do anything to speed up time in order to feel comfortable in her own body, or Lou Kline, Bennie’s mentor who becomes overly obsessed with staying young forever, each character has their own personal struggle with the concept of time. As mentioned several times in the novel, “time’s a goon” and as all of us know, goons wait for no one. Time does not care if you are Bennie Salazar and you want to go back to the days where music was played on cassette tapes and 8-tracks. Time also does not care if you are Jocelyn, another one of Bennie’s high school friends, and you want to pause time and go back to your high school days of dating 30 something year old Lou Kline and tell yourself not to get in his car while hitchhiking. Through her novel, Egan does an excellent job of getting the point across that no matter who you are or what you have been through, you cannot freeze time nor stop its ageing process.

Kurt Vonnegut also introduces the idea of time in his own narration of the story. Along with the previous idea, when the reader is introduced to Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut makes a statement about Billy: “Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.” This statement makes the point that time does not matter and that the only thing that he can do is live in the moment and deal with what is happening right now instead of what has already happened or what will happen later. Although Billy can travel back in time to the places that he used to be and the

It is said that a man can never walk into the same river twice, not because the river is changing- that after all is inevitable-but because the man will never be the same man as he once was. Time, like a river flows in a set direction and once past no amount of nostalgia is capable of reversing its course. Just as it is impossible to reverse the passage of time, it is impossible to retain a past identity. Jennifer Egan’s novel, a Visit from the Goon Squad, is a collection of short stories that each have a distinct voice and style. Although each chapter can stand alone, they are bound together by thematic elements and a complex web of relationships centered around Bennie Salazar a music executive and his assistant Sasha. In this passage Egan’s fifth narrator, Jocelyn, a recovering drug addict and a childhood friend of Bennie Salazar, returns to the Los Angeles home of her teenage love interest, Lou,a man old enough to be her father who drove her into adapting the sex, drugs and rock and roll lifestyle. With Lou on his deathbed, the now forty-three year old Jocelyn reunites with Rhea, another high school friend, and ponders the impact that time has had on their lives. This passage suggests the destructiveness of time on characters and relationships. Using setting, word choice, and personification Egan presents time as truly being a goon.

A Visit From the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan, captures the essence of aging and time through many intertwined characters’ points of view. As the novel begins and ends with one of the main characters, Sasha Grady, she describes her loneliness in life, despite living in a city, she struggles to connect with the unique people who surround her. With this said, in the other chapters, different characters tend to mimic this feeling of loneliness, with similar life experiences; the characters develop a complex web of characters, which interestingly all connects, out of chronological order. The characters’ wild past and unique life experiences cause them to resent the future, and fear time will forever take away their youth and happiness.

There is only one obvious jump in time throughout the story; this is when the narrator clarifies that they have not been with Laurence for a while, despite seeing him.

But to Miri she is going back 72 years. The author uses cliffhanger at the end of the chapter so it moves fast. For example, “One.” Molly’s hand clenched hers. “Two.”

It is for many reasons that an author may alter time in a piece of literature. John Cheever accelerates time in a somewhat subtle way in his short story The Swimmer to show the effect that alcoholism has on Neds perception of reality.

Kelly is a social worker who went to visit Crystal about the safety of her children because of her daughter’s consecutive visits to the hospital. While Kelly is there to visit Crystal, her alcoholic boyfriend, Beau Willie, kicks her out. Once Kelly is put out of Crystal’s apartment, she has a small encounter with the building tenant and the neighbor, Gilda, where she informs Kelly of Beau Willie’s wrong doing. While this is going on Juanita arrive to break off her affair with her lover, Frank, and Alice arrives to visit her daughter, Tangie, to ask for some money. After Alice is turned down by Tangie, she then takes on the streets to try and raise money, where she encounters Yasmine and her man-friend, who gives her money, but is also Alice’s younger daughter, Nyla’s, dance instructor. Nyla, is a young woman who just graduated high school and is seen at first giving a story about her graduation night and losing her virginity. Then, later we see Miss Juanita, waiting at Joanna’s office at Robe Rouge, a magazine company, where Crystal is her assistant to try and fundraise money for her non-profit organization involving women’s health care.

For the reader, going back and forth through time, jumping

First we hear longer bits of the story which takes place at home, here we get a background story and get to know the characters and the family a little bit. Afterwards we get a few sentences from the time of the accident at the lake and we get to know how the crash takes place. These two different time dimensions change all through the story. This could possibly make it a little difficult for the reader to fully understand the story. It is first in the last part of the story the reader truly gets what is really going on and what really happens at the lake. This kind of structure makes the story more interesting and also more intense because when you read the small sentences from the future you want to know what happens and what is going on but then you are taken back to the present time and have to read further.