Narrative Strategies In Experimental Novel A Visit From The Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan, a contemporary American writer, won the Pulitzer Prize Award in2011for her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, which, consisting of thirteen chapters, unrollsstories about a group of young people, who, fond of rock and roll music, gradually lose theirbearings in their life, only leaving a cruel twist of fate and wearing away of youth and alike..This novel is so extraordinary that each of the chapter has a different story in a non-lineartime sequence and with a variety of effective writing techniques. Pleasing enough to thereader, this novel emerges a strong experimental colors and unique narrative strategies, whichencourages the writer of this essay to apply the narrative focalizations, narrative time andnarrative character to comprehensively analyze the experimental turns of the novel.The thesis is divided into three chapters. The first chapter is to analyze the threefocalizations: zero focalization, internal focalization and external focalization as well, in thenarrative modes of this novel, so as to arrive at the conclusion that the focalization of thenovel is variable. In the second chapter, the thesis is ready to analyze two subverted narrativetime, including the time order and psychic time, and to come up with the understanding thattime order is non-chronological and of non-linear and the psychic time is flowing. In the thirdchapter, this paper is to analyze a pair of relative character roles, narrator and narratee in thenarrative situation, and finds that the narrator is unreliable and the narratee is untruthful.The experimental novel with the unique narrative strategy conforms to a sob time’s“goon” who brings the ideological confusion, so we can see the “goon” to visit theprotagonist of the story and make their youth fade away, their dream exhausted, and their lifeso sad. The unique narrative strategies of the novel also make the readers feel it so especialand receive a different acceptable aesthetics from the novel, and at the same time, someentertainment spirit from people’s life and their cognitive status is shown up in thetwenty-first Century.