The text is an extract from Nice Work, by David Lodge. In this extract the two protagonists are in Vic’s car when they see some Silk Cut advertisement. The narrator uses the narrative technique of showing in which the narrator report characters’ speech. He exploits the conversation between Robyn and Vic to inform the intelligent reader about the way language works. In the first part Robyn makes explicit the hidden message of the advertisement using semiotics, the study of signs. It follows that the language is the centre of this fictional product, David Lodge want to draw the intelligent reader reflects about language.

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.

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.

David Lodge’s writing is a metawriting, indeed he speaks about writing and speaking in this text.