The text I have to consider is an extract from David Lodge's novel Nice Work, in which he reports a conversation between the two main charachters: Robyn and Vic, when they are in a car.

The reader can notice that the text is arranged into two parts: the first one in which the narrator introduces the facts using the telling technique and the second one in which there is a deep and intense dialogue between the two characters and in which the narrator uses the showing technique.

The first part includes the first three paragraphs; in the first two paragraphs the narrator introduces the events and he explains the Silk Cut advertisement.Indeed while the two characters are driving along the road they see some posters advertising the brand of a famous cigarettes. The poster consists on an image of a rippling expanse of purple silk in which there is a single slit and in which there are no words, except for the Government Health Warning. So an intelligent reader can understand that the image does not refer only to the silk and that the advertise adopts the devices of literary language. Indeed the language of advertisement is a mediatic language, that is to say it employs both language and images, so that the message may stick into
the reader's or watcher's mind. The narrator wants to draw the attention of the intelligent reader to understand that the discussion about the advertise is just a pretext to reflect on the way language works and so on what metaphor and metonymy are. This strategy is the same used by David Lodge within the novel; indeed he narrates the story of Robyn and Vic but his real purpose is to explain the way of writing a text in the 20^th century. Robyn, who is a semiotic teacher, states that the poster is
a metaphor, the silk with its curves symbolized the female body while the cut reminds the idea of a vagina as well as the desire of penetrate the female body.

In the last paragraph an intelligent reader can notice immediately the narrator's points of view; he judges Vic using words with harsh sounds and connotative meaning: outraged, derision, spluttered;the last one suggests the idea of a human that does not know the language of signs.
Within the second part of the text the narrator reports the conversation between the two protagonists and he uses the showing technique; so he should not express judgements because it would be the reader that creates an own personal opinion about the carachters; however an intelligent reader can notice that the narrator thinks that Robyn is an intelligent person, differently from Vic. Robyn lives through metaphor, a figure of speech that requires a great creative force, and that is complex, hard to understand and adapt to an intelligent person; indeed she always tries to find hidden meanings. Instead Vic lives through metonymy, a figure of speech based on contiguity; indeed he thinks a cigarette is a cigarette as well as a piece of silk is a piece of silk. It is important to remember that metonymy is introduced thanks to the cigarettes smoked by Vic: Marlboro; indeed the advertise of Marlboro makes a metonymyc connection between smoking that particular brand and the outdoor life of the cowboy, who is the image of the advertise.

In the end of the text Robyn explains the difference between the two figures of speech: metaphor is based on similarity while metonymy on contiguity.