The Anxiety Of Time

Jennifer Egan is a remarkable contemporary American writer and journalist,who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011 for A Visit from the Goon Squad.This novel depicts the different lives of a group of rock lovers at various points in time,circling around Bennie Salazar,an aging rock music producer,and his sticky-fingered assistant Sasha,and their friends and associates.It nuances Egan?s insightful thinking about time,narrative,emotion,memory,life and culture.Adopting the anxiety theories of Karen Horney,Rollo May and Paul Tillich,and on the basis of intensive reading of the text,this thesis is intended to deeply analyze and interpret the anxiety of time in A Visit from the Goon Squad from the aspects of the anxiety of individuals,the imbalance of interpersonal relationships and the loss of culture in modern society.It is found that Egan sets time in the centre place of the novel in which the characters are both bearer and performer of time.In the novel,time serves not only as the technique for constructing the text,but also an irresistible enemy for the characters.Pushed around by time,the “goon squad”,individuals in the novel experience the loss of self,the passing of youth and dream,and the trauma of death;kinship and friendship become increasingly estranged and alienated;the changes in music,language and art demonstrate the anxious situation of culture in modern society.