I chose to track the word "shame" throughout Jennifer Egans novel, primarily because I feel that shame is one of the strongest themes in Welcome to the Goon Squad. I personally felt the undercurrent of shame with nearly every character and in nearly every chapter. Upon deeper investigation, I was surprised to see the word only appeared seven times throughout the novel. Maybe I read so much shame into this story through a personal lens, superimposing my own experiences onto Egan's words.

Rereading the book with this thought in mind, I tried to stay more objective. However, even with the conscious effort not to connect shame with almost every event in the novel, it still seemed a strong presence to me. Upon deeper reflection, I think that shame is such a strong theme that the word does not need to be written. It is an intangible feeling that shadows the words as opposed to more concrete themes, such as anger. While all seven instances of this word are connected directly to Bennie and Sasha, I still see it plaguing every character. Lou Lou is ashamed of her mother, Dolly is ashamed of her downfall and what she must do to make money, Jules is ashamed of his emotional instability and lack of career direction, Albert is ashamed of flirting with Mindy resulting in a lion attack. The list goes on! This book is characterized by bad decisions, and shame resulting from those decisions, at least in my eyes.

While I find endless examples of what I perceive as shame in every character, Bennie and Sasha have more direct examples. Egan uses the physical word, "shame," written in ink, on the page, to convey the enormity of shame connected with these characters. Writers as eloquent as Jennifer Egan rarely write a word without thought. I think the significance here is that she wants to show the proportion of Bennie and Sasha's shame is much greater than that of the other characters. It remains to be seen if the proportional is larger because Sasha and Bennie are more prominent characters in the story or if it is because they are characters who have more to be ashamed of. I am not confident in my ability to make this call, but this could be an interesting discussion topic in class. Why does Egan use these words in these ways? What is the significance in the distribution of the written word "shame" in this novel?