DAVID LODGE ‘’ NICE WORK’’

In the present text I am going to analyse an extract of David Lodge’s novel called ‘’Nice Work’’.

Reading some lines, the intelligent reader understand that this is an argumentative text within the narrative of David Lodge that uses a third person narrator who in this case is speaking from the point of Robin. Robin is a university professor who is having a lecture to her students.

The extract begins with the thesis: there isn’t the concept of identity.

But who had thought that identity existed? capitalism that is based on the idea that there is a man who makes profit and the classic novel based on the adventures of a protagonist with his own identity. They give for sure that identity exists.

Robin makes this idea crumble, saying that they are fake news based on the inability to analyze reality. There is no single well-defined soul that constitutes a person's identity

the idea of a unique identity is the outdated idea behind capitalism and the classic novel.

So what exists if there is no well-defined identity?

There is only a subjective position in an endless network of discourses ". It means that human beings are not unique, but are subjected to a network of discourses in which we live. Such discourses are those of power, sex, family, of science, religion, poetry, etc.

The subject is submissive. We absorb everything around us. We are cultural products

By the same token, there is no such thing as an author. who is establishing authority?

how do you become an author? The authority has who has the consent. 

In conclusion, Robin says  that human beings are not unique with their own ‘self’, we have not built a well-defined identity, it has no boundaries, the borders are water soluble takes the shape of the container and we have to deal with the speeches we were born into.