Metaphor and metonymy

The text Metaphor and Metonymy is an extract from Nice Work by David Lodge. It reports a conversation between Vic Wilcox and Robyn Penrose, taking place during a drive. While driving along the road some poster advertising the trend of Silk Cut, the famous cigarette, are visible. The writer reports the two protagonist's conversation; his objective is to reflect on the way language works, especially when it resorts to the use of metonymy and metaphor.

Reading the text the intelligent reader notices that the language of advertising is just-apposed to the language of fiction (narrative language); the language of advertising is a mediatic language: it adopts literary language to reach its objectives: making raise the selling dates; for this reason it employs both language and images so that the message sakes photographic depiction (is what image shows).

The narrator wants the intelligent reader to understand that the conversation and discussion about advertising, between the two protagonists, are just a pretext to make him reflect on the way language of advertising works to make the messages more convincible.                                                                                                              

 It looks back to the ancient Greek-rhetoric and the function for which advertising was generated is to sell the highest number of copies of Silk Cut. If it does not happen, the advertisement is not efficient. The narrator shows the working of men and women through the conversation where the concept of Derrida's differAnce is identified by Vic's answers to Robyn.

The narrator uses the technique of showing to make the reader understand the fundamental concepts of postmodernism through the conversation between Vic and Robyn. The writer exploits the conversation between the two protagonists to make the reader understand how advertising works, and to inform him about the way language works: language makes meaning organising sounds that are directly arranged in work and follows that the speaker or writer operates with language mainly on two levels of combination and at the same time on the level of selection.                                                      

The language is the forefront of D. Lodge's interest. It follows that language is the principle of investigation in that final product.

In the conversation Robyn is making explicit the way language works inside advertising. The reader understands that Vic does not understand Robyn's explanation because he reminds the denotative language while advertising adopts a system of signification which recalls and reminds the working of poetry, and the postmodern students should understand that the linguistic system makes us what we feel but also the way we speak to other people.

So the conclusion is that language is an ever working system never stable, whose meaning is always different.

In the text Robyn is identified with metaphor because the rhetorical figure of metaphor is used to give indices and for this reason it asks an implicitly skill of comprehension. She is the perfect representation between signifier and signified.

Vic on the other hand is identified with metonymy because Robyn's behaviour is perfectly visible as signs on his personality.