Shame and Silence in Goon Squad

At first when I chose to follow both “shame” and “silence” in Goon Squad, I wasn’t sure what I would find. From my experience, their meanings are theoretically different but in practice tend to be quite similar. After finishing the novel, I’d say Egan’s writing backed that idea. The connotations of the two words are directly related in the novel; when there is a silence it is almost always accompanied by shame.

            First, I do notice specific themes upon looking at shame individually. This word is an interesting one, because it appears 7 times throughout the novel, and the overwhelming majority of those times are in reference to Bennie and Sasha (whom many people in class today asserted are the two main characters, although the jury’s still out). However, my point is that shamefulness is definitely a defining attribute for Egan’s primary characters. In just the first 32 pages (during Sasha and Bennie’s chapters) the word is used 5 different times. Sasha, fairly obviously, feels shame in relation to her theft; her collection of objects, while oddly comforting to her, consistently makes her feel “shame of their acquisition” (Egan 15). Bennie, then, has an entire list of “shame memories,” which we learn about immediately in the very first sentence of his chapter (Egan 19). Egan really likes to accentuate  Bennie’s shame; she uses almost ridiculously colorful language when describing it, such as “a feeling of liquid shame” and “waves of shame so intense they seemed to engulf whole parts of [his] life” (Egan 30 &32). One cannot really seem to exaggerate the importance of the role that shame plays in Egan’s characters’ lives.

            Then comes silence, fitting in almost perfectly with this theme by radiating an aura of negativity almost every time the word’s used. Silence is seen 6 times throughout the novel, and the overwhelming majority of those times are used to convey something very akin to shame (or other negative emotions, like anger or solitude). It is first used, not surprisingly, in Sasha’s first chapter, when she is with her therapist and is ashamed of the fact that she’s not getting any better. Sasha and Coz “sat in the longest silence that had ever passed between them,” and this silence is clearly reflective of her negative feelings of failure. It is also used much later to describe Dolly’s shame in her growing distance from her daughter, expressing that “the silence between them had become inviolable” (Egan 161). Another occurrence of the word that I found interesting was when it appeared in verb form on page 210. Here, Ted Hollander asks “how could so much devastation have been silenced?” also using the word as a reference to shame (the shame of covering up screams and ash in Pompeii) (Egan 210).

            Overall, I’m glad I followed both of these words throughout the novel, because their roles sort of intertwined more and more throughout every chapter. Whether Egan intended it or not, I found a distinct relationship between shame and silence, and I found them to together create a major theme of the novel.