The extract is taken from D. Lodge's Nice Work, a Postmodern parody of the Victorian novel, and it includes an argumentative text about Victorian fiction and about the concept of identity.

The parody of the Victorian novel is obtained by a text resorting to a third-person omniscient intrusive narrator: his intrusion is very frequent (we travel back, I shall, I will tell you...).

The main character is Robyn Penrose; she is introduced by the narrator's judgement very awkwardly for me, that creates expectations in the reader: the woman seems to be unconventional, especially when the reader knows she does not believe in the idea of character. Just form the beginning the reader is guided and affected by the narrator.

Robyn's characterization refers to her gender, her conception of the novel, her favourite phrase, her job, her convictions about the Victorian Age (fiction and capitalism) and about the concept of identity.

Pieces of information about her job (in particular temporary) let her reader discovers she is young and lives a temporary condition; her activity also reveals she possesses high literacy.

That is to say, her most frequent expression, occurs several times in the text: the narrator gives the illusion she sis speaking and, at the same time, he parodies her and provokes laughter in the reader.

The thesis held by Robyn are actually the novelist's convictions.

The first one refuses the concept of  character, because it is a bourgeois myth and corresponds to the ideology of capitalism; the label myth means that the character is an imaginary creation to offer readers a model of behaviour: Oliver Twist, for example, represents the self-made man who can progress. It follows that capitalism was reinforced by Victorian fiction.

Robyn argues her first thesis establishing a parallelism between the development of capitalism and the spread of  the novel. Such parallelism is justified by the sharing of Puritanism, that is faith in God and in material progress; the narrator's intrusion (why... Robyn) provides plausibility to her reasoning and underlines her intellectual ability.

Also the idea of identity is shared by the novel and by capitalism: in both cases the individual is a potential self-made man, he/she possesses a unique self which he/she can control and orientate to a precise aim.

Another aspect that connects fiction to capitalism is the way of novelists' production: they adequate themselves to economic needs and the novel is fully subdued to market roles.

However the main concept concerns the idea of the self that Robyn doesn't share: she refuses the idea of a compact, definite identity and she believes identity is multiple, it includes a succession of conscious or unconscious states in front of discourses, facts, relationships. The adjective subject underlines the passive condition of the soul that is "hit" and modelled by the external world and that is not a strong "I" who can choose and improve in a linear way.

This is the reason why she doesn't believe in the existence of the character and of the author; moreover she holds that a text is never original: according to Derrida and to literary Structuralism (anticipated by Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Tallent") a text has not to be considered an isolated creation, but inside a system in which it is linked to other texts with quotes and allusions.

It follows that the writer's presence disappears and the focus is put on the semiotic mechanism inside the text (no origins, only production).

Robyn's reflection considers also language: the way in which someone speaks reveals his/her identity both conscious and unconscious; the underlined expression revealed the ambivalent relationship between the speaker and the speech: not all discursive formations are conscious.

The sequence ends with the narrator's comment on the character: she is a common woman even if she belongs to a different social kind.