Wibbly-Wobbly, Timey Wimey Stuff

In Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, time plays a very important role. In fact, this novel reminds me much of the British television series Doctor Who for its ability to jump around in time. Time can only be measured by the minutes, seconds, hours, days, weeks months and years that make it up. It moves in a linear fashion, and the world can never move backwards in that line. However, Egan plays with time. She jumps around to show snapshots of different moments in a character's life. For example, when the reader first meets Lou, he seems to be an older man stuck on living the life of a person much younger than himself. He wants the glory of being young forever. The next time we meet Lou, he is younger still, involved with a woman not much older than his children, yet still searching for something more than himself, like a kind of eternal youth. And the last time we see the world through Lou's eyes, he says he "got old," and is dying in his home of his age, no longer able to live out the dream he was searching for.

Egan uses time to shape how each character is viewed and judged in succession. In a way, it both mimics and mocks real life, because when we meet an individual on the street, we judge them for what we see in that snapshot moment. We assume things about them based on appearances and the way they carry themselves in the moment, like we do to the characters in Egan's novel. However, Egan attempts to shape our view by moving both directions on the timeline of a character's life, giving us background that we did not know upon initially meeting a character, and then moving forward to show how they have changed, and making us think differently of them. This jumping forward and backward in time connects the novel like a web, not like a line. It goes against the flow which other novels typically follow. By doing this, Egan creates a whole new experience for the reader and manipulates their reaction. In this aspect, Egan's novel is extremely unique because it cannot be classified as a typically exposition, plot climax, and resolution novel. The resolution for one character may come before their exposition, and the plot lies in between the two moments. It creates a suspense that makes the reader continue reading, even if they end up hating the characters she creates.