The first part of the second chapter of David Lodge's novel describes the personality of Robyn Penrose. Robin Penrose is the second character described in the book (the first is Mr. Wilcox), as reported in the first lines that are aimed at linking the first with the second chapter.
The part of the chapter that describes Ms. Penrose is composed by four paragraphs.
Starting from the beginning of the description the writer gives general information about Ms. Penrose job and workplace, but the intelligent reader easily understands that what David Lodges wants to describe is not Ms. Penrose's life but her thoughts. As matter of fact her job is named to introduce a theme that characterizes Ms. Penrose's personality and that guides her life: the contempt for capitalism and all its products (for instance the classic novel and the figure of the character) because of her postmodern vision of life. This hate seems to be very important in Ms. Penrose's life to the point that the novelist repeats it twice in the last lines of the first paragraph.
The second paragraph is meant to better analyse the way classic novels collaborated to capitalism according to Robin Penrose. The main reason she finds is that classic novels and capitalism are both products of the "secularized Protestant ethic" that leads everyone to believe to have the control of his/her own destiny and to fight against other humans looking for the happiness and the fortune. To better demonstrate the way capitalism and novels are linked Ms. Penrose defines a novelist "a capitalist of the imagination" and the novel as "the first mass-produced artefact".
In the third paragraph another important aspect of Ms. Penrose's personality is revealed: she is feminist. Nevertheless this aspect of her personality should not strike the intelligent reader because in the previous paragraphs sometimes it has already been used the double pronoun "his/her" in her statements to underline the importance of the difference between men and women. However, this is not the first topic this paragraph deals with because it begins with the continuation of the development of Ms. Penrose's argumentation against classic novel and capitalism. The self "a finite, unique soul or essence that constitutes a person's identity" on which they are founded, but that does not exist in an "infinite web of discourse" and the intertextuality are analysed to underline Ms. Penrose position once again. The last lines of the paragraph describe Ms. Penrose from a different point of view, as a common woman with the same problems and inclination of all others human beings linking this paragraph to the following one.
After the long description of Ms. Penrose thoughts, the early hours of a January Monday are briefly described. This paragraph is important because shows how Ms. Penrose's life is and the way she behaves. The novelist compares Ms. Penrose's rising to Mr. Wilcox's one.
Analysing the structure of the first part of the chapter a intelligent reader notices it has a mirror structure because it opens and closes giving the information a reader expects to have in a common novel, but in the middle there is a digression aimed at giving further information to better understand the personality of the character.
In this part of the novel can also be found a massive presence of David Lodge's comments ("rather awkwardly for me...I shall...I will tell you about...") aimed at clarify some aspects of the narration or to involve the reader in the story.