Posted: June 21st, 2013

Narrative Perspective in A Visit from the Goon Squad

For Your Essay: you must consider the role that narrative perspective plays in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and support an original argument about how narrative perspective illuminates a central theme of the work.CLICK HERE TO GET MORE………
Suggestions:
Listed below are several potential entry points into you analysis. Please do not simply answer these questions in your essay. These are just ideas and questions that might help you during the pre-dradt stage:
-Some narratological terms you might want to deploy in your analysis; mood, voice, distance, focalization, stream of consciousness, external focalization, internal focalization, zero focalization
-You may want to analyze a single chapter that you think is especially productive towards your analysis, or compare two chapters according to narrative perspective so much in her novel? What is the thematic point of her experiments?
-Does Egan’s choice of narrative perspective in a specific chapter reflect something about the central character of that chapter?
-Prior to developing your thesis, you might want to map the novel, briefly describing the narration of each chapter and the connections between the narration and the events of the chapter
Reading Questions:
1) How would you describe the novel’s stance towards media technologies, whether old or new?
2) In what ways does the novel engage with the practices of digital culture, specifically the uses and structures of social media networks?
3) Think of the novel in terms of heterglossia. What do the proliferation of voices and text-types amount to thematically?
4) In what ways do characters narrate themselves and each other? What stories do they tell about themselves? Why?
5) How do characters in this novel think? Are they in control of their thoughts? Do they try to control their thoughts? For that matter, are they in control of their bodies? In what ways do they try to correct or take control of their bodies? CLICK HERE TO GET MORE………