Capitalist Dreams and Disillusionment Across Generations in Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad

Abstract

Drawing on frameworks of Marxian alienation, generational identity and capitalist realism, this research paper aims to critically study thematic of ambition, success and alienation in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. Through the use of Mark Fisher’s theory of capitalist realism, this thesis asserts that Egan’s characters are formed by a capitalist system which imposes itself as the sole viable social and economic paradigm leading to ubiquitous disillusionment and the impossibility of imagining other alternatives.

    Through Strauss and Howe’s generational theory, the paper examines how capitalist values are experienced and interpreted differently by different generations in the novel, to show how previous generations’ priorities have changed as younger characters switch from material success to the search for authenticity, arguably against older generations’ aspirations. Egan’s characters feel an extreme alienation, as their identity is tied to capitalist ambition, illustrated with Marxists theories of alienation, particularly as laid out by Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse.

     In addition, the fragmented narrative structure of the novel as the textual reading of the incoherence between personal aspirations and/or aspirations of the idealized society and the prevailing societal definition of success, constitutes the textual reading of the alienation in capitalist systems. This paper argues that A Visit from the Goon Squad acts as a critique of modern capitalist culture which reveals the existential cost of ambition in an economic system that does not meet deeper human needs, and contributes to a cycle of generational disillusion.