Analysis of an extract from David Lodge's Nice Work

Just from looking at the extract's layout, the reader notes the text is organized in some descriptive paragraphs and pieces of direct speeches. So the intelligent reader understands the narrator used the narrative techniques of telling and showing.

The extract deals with the Silk Cut advertisement, whose Robyn explains the way to persuades people to buy the product. Indeed Robyn is a semiotic teacher and the Silk Cut advertisement conveys messages through metaphorical language. She tries to teach to Vic the way the signs communicate. The Cigarettes' advertisement is composed by a piece of purple silk textile, when there is a cut. Silk appeals in the reader's mind to the sinuous women' s body and so the cut represents the sexual female organ. The meaning of the advertisement raises reader's curiosity,who wants to understand the advertising campaign's choice and David Lodge uses the same strategy.

Nice Work deals with Vic and Robyn's story, but David Lodge wants to focus the reader's attention to the way of writing a text in twentieth century. Indeed the following extract is a pretext to make the reader understand on the way the language works.

The narrator' s point of view is really evident. He judges Vic through the use of words with harsh sound or connotative meaning. For example the verb spluttered suggests a human spitting, the excessive reaction of Vic and his un-knowledge of semiotics; while the use of imperfect subjunctive in the hypothetical period he thought this was a knock-down argument, suggests the impossibility that Vic' s deduction could be right.

Following the reading the reader understands the narrator's way to describe Vic and Robyn. The first one lives through metonymy while the other through metaphor. So the reader is made able to understand narrator's judge. The metaphor is complex, hard to understand and it is adapt to intelligent people like Robyn, on the contrary the metonymy.