Investigating the “Infinite Real” in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad: A Metamodernist Approach

The 21st-century literature has experienced a shift of ideas reflected in metamodernism, introduced by Vermeulen and Akker in 2010. Although metamodernism is a critical approach in its naissance, it is observable in a large body of the 21st-century literature through certain narrative and thematic features which have proven to move in line with contemporary socio-cultural issues. Although metamodernism plays with and modifies specific elements of modernism and postmodernism, it is exclusive to the artworks of the last two decades in which certain terminologies such as the “infinite Real,” an aversion of the “Real” in former philosophical and psychological disciplines, suggest that truth and reality are infinite and that the past and the future are connected through a plastic connection. A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) by Jennifer Egan makes a good example of the metamodernist novel regarding the author’s network of characters in their approaches toward the reality of their lives as it is constantly redefined in association with their past. In this light, the novel is to thematically embed the concept of the “infinite Real” in the first decade of the third millennium.