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Foreshadowing
Genre
Explanation and Analysis:
Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad is a work of fiction that experiments with many literary genres, adopting features from both the short story and the novel, as well as from unconventional forms.
In one respect, A Visit from the Goon Squad resembles a short story collection: each chapter tells its own story, is given its own unique setting, and focuses on a select band of characters. Egan assembles these stories in a non-chronological manner, with every chapter beginning a new, independent timeline that does not follow from the previous chapter. Indeed, some suggest that these connected short stories might be compared to a vinyl record: Egan divides her stories into two collections, Part A and Part B, not unlike the A and B sides of a physical record, with the stories representing songs from a musical album. Therefore, the structure itself of A Visit from the Goon Squad incorporates the motif of music central to the plot.
But A Visit from the Goon Squad also resembles a unified, coherent novel: characters recur across the 13 chapters, and multiple intersecting narratives connect them together despite the work's non-chronological structure. For example, Sasha, the main character of Chapter 1, reappears throughout the later chapters as a secondary character to Bennie, Scotty, Rob, Ted, and Alex, with both her past at NYU and Naples as well as her present career as assistant to Bennie intersecting the lives of these characters.
Beyond the short story and the novel, Egan also includes more unconventional literary genres, writing Chapter 9 in the form of a magazine article and Chapter 12 as a PowerPoint presentation. Egan's experimentation across genres is characteristic of postmodernism, a literary and arts movement originating in the mid-to-late 20th century that rejects stability in form and meaning. A Visit from the Goon Squad incorporates postmodernist features like unreliable narration, non-chronology, and genre hybridity.
