The extract is taken from David Lodge's novel "Nice Work" published in 1988. It recalls a conversation between Robyn and Vic about the advertisement of a cigarette brand (Silk Cut) that two protagonists saw numerous times during their trip. The aim of the text is to entertain the reader and at the same time to make explicit the different function of metaphor and metonymy in communication. In particular, the narrator focuses on the relationship between signifier and signify, which is a central problem for semiotic. He uses the narrative techniques of telling and showing to make the reader to better understand the facts.

During a drive, the characters see the ad of the brand of cigarettes and  Robyn interprets it as a reference to the female body, and the slit as a symbolic representation of a vagina. David Lodge wants to make the intelligent reader to understand that the discussion and the conversation are just a pretext to  reflect on the way of speaking, indeed the narrator wants to discuss about language.

In the second part of the dialogue, Vic says that he smokes Marlboros, and Robyn takes the oppurtunity to reflect about difference between metaphor and metonymy. Indeed Robyn states that "metaphor is a figure of speech based on similarity, whereas metonymy is based on contiguity. In metaphor you substitute something like the thing you mean for the thing itself, whereas in metonymy you substitute some attribute or cause or effect of the thing for the thing itself". Vic doesn't understand what Robyn is saying, indeed he has a metonymy style of life, while Robyn lives through metaphor. So the reader is made able to understand David Lodge's judgement; that is to say, the metaphor is more complex and difficult than the metonymy.

However the extract deals with the way of speaking and it has the function to explain clearly, through the direct speech, the idea of the narrator, and at the same time to entertain the reader.