EXTRACT FROM DAVID LODGE “NICE WORK” (1982) The extract I’m going to analyze is a description of a female character, Robyn Penrose (Robin Pennarosa). This is not a common description because the writer does not underline her physical aspect but he gives the reader an overture of her way of thought and her manners through the use ofan intrusive and omniscient third person narrator (he speaks in his text: at the very beginning of the extract the narrator tells to the reader that he’s going to tell about a different character from Vic Wilcox, the character that Lodge was probably analyzing previously/ at the end of the text he expresses his thoughts, he makes an intrusion: Robyn belongs to a very different social species from Wilcox). Robyn is a Temporary Lecturer In English Literature at the University of Rummidge, so she does not have a stable work. The narrator shows to the reader the thesis of her way of thought: she sustains that “the idea of character is a bourgeois myth, an illusion created to reinforce the ideology of capitalism”. She argues this thesis saying that the entire development of the Novel is historically connected to Capitalism, cause they are both expressions of a Protestant ethic (men are owner of their destiny…), and that novelists are capitalists of their imagination : the novel was the first mass-produced cultural artefact. Though this the reader finds out that Robyn supports Post-modernist philosophy (the character does not exist) and moreover that she adheres to Derrida’s deconstructional thought: she believes in the idea of a character determined thought “what he speaks”, thought his language and his various actions in different situations. But Robyn’s way of thought doesn’t affect so much her behaviour; so she seems like anyone else in this imperfect world and this helps the narrator to treat her as a “character”