The Postmodern Narrative Subversion: Contextualizing Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Gabriel García Márquez’s Strange Pilgrims

This study examines the thematic and narrative confluence found in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) and Gabriel García Márquez’s Strange Pilgrims (1992), highlighting their alignment with postmodern literary culture. In doing so, it explores how Egan and Márquez in these two books challenge modern literary norms and call for imaginative spaces for coexistence, pluralism, and resistance. Egan’s repertoire of twelve stories and Márquez’s thirteen stories reject adherence to fixed genre boundaries, consistent narrative voice, characters, and contexts. With twelve disparate yet converging stories, Márquez’s Strange Pilgrims exhibits postmodern features such as disjointed narratives, magical realism, dislocation of space and time, plurality in characterization, and the reimaging of identity against literary and societal narratives through the voices of Latin American exiles in Europe. Both books construct a fragmented yet interconnected collage of diverse character experiences. Through a comparative literary analysis, this paper argues that these texts, despite originating from different spatial and temporal contexts, correspond to postmodern narrative poetics that represent the fractured condition of modern life. These traits can be situated, as this study contends, within a broader postmodern framework that critiques cultural cynicism, ethnocentrism, and political indoctrination, while simultaneously offering signs of optimism, co-existence, and counter-narrative assertion. By applying postmodern theories of ‘double coding’ and narrative disjuncture, the study thus underscores how both texts foment revisionist ruptures within Western-centric literary traditions, resisting homogeneity and authoritarian narrative forms in modern literature. Spectrum, Volume 19, June 2024: 1-12