EXTRACT FROM “NICE WORK” BY DAVID LODGE (1982)

The object of the present text is to provide my personal present analysis about the narrative strategies used by the narrator in an extract we read in class. 

To start with the extract belongs to David Lodge’s “Nice Work” where Robin, the main character, is having a university lecture to her students. 

According to the extract Robin characterization comes to life slowly during the lecture.

Robin starts her lesson explaining her thesis: she is denies the idea that anyone has only an identity and she provides lots of argumentations in support of the thesis.

Indeed, according to Robyn and to the writers who have influenced her thinking on how to write a novel, there is no “self” as a finite and unique soul or essence that constitutes a person’s identity”. But Robyn states that the existence of the “self” is a fake news, because according to her, “there is only a subject position in an infinite web of discourses”. It means that the human beings are not unique, but they are subdued to a web of discourses within which we live. Such discourses are the ones of power, sex, family, science, religion, poetry etc., but also the ones of language, history, culture of the place we were born. What Robin denies was one of the foundations of capitalism, which is based on the idea that the good entrepreneur is the one who owns a capital and knows how to make it profitable and of the classic novel (the nineteenth-century one), which is based on the adventures of a protagonist with his own identity and which is characterized by putting into discussion the past truth.

Robyn goes on saying that since there is no such thing as the ‘self’, there is also “no such thing as the author”, who is the one “who originates a work of fiction ‘ab nihilo’”. Indeed, according to the teacher, each text comes from other texts, therefore it is a product of the interaction with other texts and consequently, every author has read other texts before writing. It follows that no text comes from anything, but that everyone “is a product of intertextuality, a tissue of allusions to and citations of other texts”. After that, the narrator quotes Jacques Derrida’s words “there is nothing outside the text” to underline her knowledge of famous people and also to underline that there are also other people who thinks like her.

Continuing with the development of the argumentation, since there is no author and since every text is a product of intertextuality, Robyn asserts that “there are no origins, there is only production, and we produce our ‘selves’ in language”. Consequently, it means human beings are linguistic products that exist in relation to linguistic interactions.

An other important aspect is that her name “Robin” reminds to a male name and to Robin Hood: as Robin Hood has fought a lot of battles also Robin had a lot of difficulties to face too because she had completely change the way of think.

All things considered it is clear that Robin’s personality comes to life during her lecture and the narrator creates her personality trough suspense therefore the reader wants to go with the reading since he is curios.

Robyn thinks that human beings are not unique with their own ‘self’, but they produce their selves in language. Indeed, they are subjected to an “infinite web of discourses” and the language is one of them.