Entangled Narratives: Through Quantum Entanglement and Dialogism: Exploring Character Relationships in A Visit from the Goon Squad

Abstract

This research analyses Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad through the lenses of Quantum Literary Theory and Bakhtinian dialogism to explain how entangled relationships and dialogic interactions across time shape identity. The novel’s disjointed, broken narrative and scattershot timeline represents the way in which identity is both malleable and relational ― see characters like Bennie, Sasha, Lou, and Scotty. The resulting transformations of the identity of these characters are driven by memories and pulls from beyond the temporal and physical. The novel by Egan shows that identity is a construct, a construction of various identities, relations. The entangled place these relationships with other people play out on characters’ sense of self is complex and lasting.

        The novel draws on concepts from quantum mechanics like entanglement, nonlocality, to imagine these relational dynamics connected from place to place in space, and time. Taking Bakhtinian dialogism as the lens through which to understand these interactions, the lens is that identity is co constructed in ongoing dialogue with others. The novel problematizes traditional ideas of identity as static and independent by its rendering of memory as dialogic and dynamic. Whereas most other books staked out identity before describing how to lose it, A Visit from the Goon Squad instead offers identity as a construction predicated on the experiences and ongoing dialog that cement the interconnections among people. Above all, the novel in essence reimagines the autonomous self as entirely constituted by relationship, memory, and the utter ineradicability of others.