Nice Work is a novel written by D. Lodge, and it a good example of postmodernism writing . The extract from Nice Work is taken from the second chapter of the novel: the narrator has just finished to present the first protagonist, Vic Wilcox and he is going to analyze the second character, Robin Penrose. She is a female character and her name evokes Robyn Hood, while her surname evokes the literature (pen) and the femininity (rose). She is a Temporary Lecturer of English Literature at University of Rummidge. The reader catches the important information that she is precarious and so she expresses a fundamental condition in Postmodernism. In addition she doesn't believe in the concept of character and she connects the novel to capitalism and she is sure about the death of an autonomous and individual "self" in contemporary context. So Robyn's characterization is a pretext for the narrator to expand an analysis on the change in literature.
As Robin discusses in her lecture, the rise of the novel coincided with the rise of capitalism in the eighteenth century, so that it is possible to claim that the novel is a capitalist product. As a result they are both expression of Protestant ethic, which is based on the idea of parallelism between social progress and salvation, and both the novel and capitalism developed the idea of a competitive, individual self, who is rationally responsible for his/her happiness and fortune. In conclusion the book is a product, produced by the novelists, capitalists of the imagination; manufactured by publishers and consumed by readers.
The narrator is a third person omniscient intrusive narrator, so the reader is not free to make up a personal idea about characters because of the filtration of the narrator.