In this text I’m going to analyse an extract taken from “Nice Work” written by David Lodge, as a postmodern answer to Hard Times.

The extract is focused on the characterization of the protagonist, Robyn Penrose, a temporary English lecturer at the University of Rummidge.

She is a woman even Robyn is a male’s name which recalls Robin Hood, and her surname suggests her profession (pen) and her femininity (rose).

The third person omniscient narrator uses Robyn’s characterization to tell the reader about the protagonist and the writer’s idea: the concept of character, as percived in the classic novel, doesn’t exsist. It is a bourgeois myth, born as a product of the ideology of Capitalism, as novel itself. Indeed the rise and the crysis of novel coincides with Capitalism’s ones.

Moving on Robyn supports her thesis: literature is a product of a secularized Protestant ethic because of the idea of a human being that can control his action and compete with others, which is the basis of Capitalism. Then the novelist is compared to somebody who trasforms imagination into a novel, as a mass product. An example is Daniel Defoe, the first novelist, who was a merchant.

In the last paragraph the narrator tells to the reader that Robyn believes in Jacques Derrida’s philosophy: semiotic materialism. It tells that “we are what speaks us”: we are texts that are continuely interpreted by people and we can’t completly control our commuication, so a single identity, a certain self cannot exist. Indeed the narrator comments (between parenthesis) the texts, following the postmodern technique of metanarrative.

In conclusion the author doesn’t exist because every text is a product of intertextuality, nobody creates anything, but takes inspiration from others. Also Robyn herself and her convinctions are a product of what she has read.