A Visit From The Goon Squad Analysis

Youth is often paralleled with an utopian ideal that adults cling to. In “Musée des Beaux Arts,” Auden asserts the the idea that age is not equivalent to youth, and these concepts do not affect the natural order of society, “Its human position: how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along: / How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting / For the miraculous birth there always must be / Children who did not specially want it to happen…” (3-7). In A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, The Hours by Michael Cunningham, and Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, all the authors use adults who act like youth, and youth whose maturity level surpasses their age to depict the disconnect between age and youth. Each author uses an age difference related to a maturity level to assert that youth is merely a permutation of attitude, and is not related to age. In A Visit from the Goon Squad, Lulu exemplifies maturity at the young age of nine. Lulu’s mother, Dolly, is a publicist that fell from fame and spent time in jail; the reality of having both an absentee mother and an absentee father forced her to grow up quickly, “Overhearing her daughter on the phone with her friends, Dolly was awed by her authority: she was stern when she needed

Egan uses Lulu and Jules, Cunningham uses Richie and Virginia, and Kafka uses Grete and Gregor to show that age and youth are two separate ideas that are not necessarily related. Each of the younger characters had more maturity than the adults, or older characters in each of the novels. Youth is an attitude that induces certain actions in stressful situations, such as Virginia running away when she was overwhelmed, instead of using her words, or Gregor surrendering his abilities and allowing everyone to take care of him; age is simply a number of years that one has been