NiCE WORK

The text I'm going to analyze is an extract from  Nice Work, by D. Lodge and it is a parody of the Victorian novel.

In the extract there is a third person, omniscient, intrusive narrator, as the reader can understand by some expressions like

"...let us leave..."

"...while we travel..."

"...a favourite phases of her own..."

"...famous to people like Robyn, anyway..."

"...antihumanist, yes; inhuman, no, she would interject...".

The writer uses a third person narrator because he's paroding the Victorian novel.

The function of the first part of the extract is the introduction of a new character.

The narrator creates curiosity/expectations into the reader because he presents a character using just some clues.

The reader understand that there is an unusual/non ordinary/ unconventional character, a woman who doesn't believe in the concept of character(the reader understands that she is cultured too); The writer specifies that she is a temporary lecturer: the reader understands that she is not a permanent person and that she is a young person (this reminding to the reader that the sense of stability during the Postmodernism: is completely removed).

An additional detail is that the character's name is a man' s name: Robyn, recalling to the mind Robyn Hood, the man who beat a bed horse.

To create Robyn' s characterisation, the narrator refers  to the character' s gender, ideas (that are unusual, like her!), her use of language (characterised by her typical expression "that to say") and her social and cultural background.

As for Robyn' s ideas, they are typically post modern: she clearly explain that the logic of the novel is perfectly consisted with the one of capitalism because it is based on a character' s single identity.

Robyn explains that Novel and Capitalism are the result of a religious ethics: the Puritanism.

Capitalists and novelists are both looking for progress, they find happiness and fortune according to materialism logich and they have to win the marke competition.

Robyn doesn' t believe in this idea of character.