An Interpretion Of A Visit From The Goon Squad In Light Of Lacan's Desire Theory

Jennifer Egan is one of the distinguished postmodernist writers in America.Her masterpiece,A Visit from the Goon Squad(2010),was highly praised as a pioneer of postmodernist novels and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2011.Jennifer Egan and her works have attracted the global concern and been studied by more and more scholars in the world.The novel takes the development of rock music as the background and tells the life story of a group of young people who love rock music.This work,composed of 13 chapters,has strong identity with post-modern novel features,and each chapter tells the story of different protagonists.These 13 chapters can be separate into a story,but also can be combed into one whole story.In this work,Egan compares time to invisible goon,which tortures and oppresses every character,and imposes people to suffer enormous mental pressure.The protagonists in the novel face the passage of time,the parting youth,the unrealized dreams and the broken emotions have produced serious anxiety and depression.Experts and scholars at home and abroad study mainly from the post-modern novel characteristics research,time and music research,as well as anxiety theory and trauma theory,and,however there are not ample studies from a psychoanalysis.The theoretical framework of this thesis is adopted the desire theory put forward by Jacques Lacan,a famous German philosopher.through the way of text reading carefully,trying to interpret the work from a new angle,that is,Lacan's desire theory.This paper takes three levels of Lacan's desire theory as the dividing points,and explores the behavior performance of character's desire at each level one by one.The first level is need,which analyzes Sasha and Dolly in order to satisfy the material needs of life to break through the moral boundaries.The second level is the demand,which analyzes the different emotional demands of the characters' love,friendship,affection,and interpersonal attachment in different emotional relationships.In every emotional relationship,no matter how close the relationship is,it is impossible to completely understand each other's minds and act to their willing accordingly.Therefore,people's emotional demands can not be fully satisfied.The third level is the desire,that is,the desire of the other,whose essence is the desire for the recognition of others.Scotty,Rob and other characters' desire for dreams,love,and reputation derives from their lack of recognition by others.Eventually,the characters get into painful identity anxiety.Jennifer Egan shows off her superb post-modern writing skills and sophisticated writing proficiency in A Visit from the Goon Squad.With her keen observation and expressiveness,as well as her unique insights into memory,emotion,time,life and culture,she exposes about the tremendous psychological pressures and anxiety about the unsatisfied desire of people in modern American society.By analyzing the individual's behavior in the “three levels of desire” theory,this thesis explains the individual's desire to seek self-identity and the desire to counterbalance the absurd other,and highlights the author's humanistic concern for the identity loss and anxiety of modern people by trying to gain survival value and find the meaning of life.