I'm going to analyse the extract taken from Nice Work written by David Lodge.

He is introducing a new character, Robyn Penrose, after he had already spoken of the male character, Vic Wilcox.

The narrator gives pieces of information about her; before telling the reader her name he wants to inform the reader about a piece of information that he judges more important: she doesn't believe in the concept of character.

Going on with the reading the reader comes to know her name, Robyn Penrose. The name seems to be a male name (and it seems to recall Robyn Hood).

So the reader knows her thanks to her thoughts about the character and then thanks to her name.

She is Temporary Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Rummidge, as it is written immediately after her name; it means that her work is important in her characterization and in the story.

The name of the university is a fictional name, it doesn't exist in reality.

The next piece of information given by the writer is that Robyn considers the character as a "bourgeois myth ", created only to support and reinforce the ideology of capitalism.

The ideology of capitalism consists in producing to gain and in investing again the profit to gain more than before.

The consequence for her assertion is that the rise of the novel in the eighteen century coincides with the rise of capitalism, as a matter of fact the novel is the literary genre par excellence.

The novel and capitalism proceed together.

It is clear that Robyn embrace the ideology of post-modernism.

The characterization goes on giving information about Robyn's thoughts; in particular the narrator explains, according to Robyn's point of view, "why the classic novel should have collaborated with the spirit of capitalism".

The specification given by the narrator where he adds that the previous sentence was "perfectly obvious" to Robyn as the function of showing the reader a further aspect of her thought.

After that there is an explanation of it: the narrator underlines the relationship between the novel and capitalism, as he says in a comment in the text, it is also what Robyn explains in full seminar.