A Visit From The Goon Squad Essay

Reflective Essay A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan is a novelist from America. She has written four books and one of her books, which is A Visit from the Goon Squad, won Pulitzer Price for Fiction in 2011. Her unique writing style in A Visit from the Goon Squad has contributed to her win back then. As stated by Egan in her interview with The Guardian in 2011, she always wants to make something new that is different from her previous novels. In this book, she uses disjointed storylines to tell the story. Egan disjointed writing style depict how the connection of past and present time affected the lives of the characters, especially Sasha.

Egan uses disjointed storylines in past, present, and future. This disjointed storylines not in random ways, instead there is always connection between one another. For example, in the

The story begins with Sasha present day when she is having date with Alex. In the first chapter, it shows that Sasha is kleptomania. “Everything there, I swear, I didn’t even open it. It’s this problem I have.” (pg. 11) The word “this problem” here emphasise that she has disorder that make her steal something. However, we do not know the reason why and when she started shoplifting if Egan did not tell Sasha’s past experience. Later on, we know that her habit came out for nowhere, but we know that she started shoplifting when she was thirteen. “She’d started shoplifting at thirteen with her girlfriends” (pg. 113). After she did the shoplifting, she felt “her whole body glow” (pg. 113) and she felt happy and enjoy with shoplifting “counting the days until they could do it again” (pg.113). Unfortunately, this bad habit continues until she grows up which she feels she could satisfy her pleasure when she is stealing. This chapter also become an answer of the confusion in the reason why she is doing shoplifting in the first