Analysis of the extract taken from Nice Work by David Lodge

At the beginning of this extract Lodge paves the way to describe a female character. This female character is presented by Lodge using the technique of telling and the description focus her attention on three main character’s sides: her opinion about character, her name and  her job. This short description is a pretext to talk about Postmodernism, and Robyn is the pretext to talk about the role of the novel. Robyn Penrose, her name (Robyn evokes the popular myth of Robin Hood and Penrose connect her to literature), doesn’t believe in the concept of character: she considers it as a bourgeois illusion created to reinforce the ideology of capitalism. Robyn is a temporary lecturer at the University and she’s discussing about the role of novel in Modernism and Postmodernism: Robyn’s lecture becomes a text inside the text. Novel’s traditional structure is questioned by new modernist and postmodernist novels. Robyn assures that novel rises at the same time of capitalism, and the falling of capitalism makes the novel falls too. Indeed, both capitalism and traditional novel are expression of a secularized Protestant ethic, where the character was the centre of attention, with his/her skills and features and his/her aims, for example to progress on the social scale. The traditional novel is a product that consumers don’t want until they don’t know it.

This text want to be a reflection about modernist and postmodernist way of thinking. How does the human being react to technologic progress? How does time and space conception changes? What are the changes? Technologic and scientific progress helped human to explain the things around them. Time and space are not separate concepts, human psychology is for the first time theorized. All these things considered make humans insecure, they are not more the centre, high and bottom levels become a unique level (high and low social classes, high an popular music, …), The change of life conditions make humans become hybrids, different from what they seem. As a consequence, also literature changes: now the most frequently used narrative form is the monologue, reducing the plot.