UNIVERSITATEA din BUCUREŞTI

FACULTATEA de LIMBI şi LITERATURI STRĂINE

LUCRARE METODICO-ŞTIINŢIFICĂ
pentru ACORDAREA GRADULUI DIDACTIC I

Coordonator ştiinţific:

Prof. univ. dr. Monica Bottez

Autor:

Zîmbrea Amalia (căs. Gamureac)

Grup Şcolar Industrial “Nicolae Teclu”, Bucureşti

2012
 UNIVERSITATEA din BUCUREŞTI
FACULTATEA de LIMBI şi LITERATURI STRĂINE

TEACHING POSTMODERNIST CHARACTER

Coordonator ştiinţific:
Prof. univ. dr. Monica Bottez

Autor:
Zîmbrea Amalia (căs. Gamureac)
Grup Şcolar Industrial “Nicolae Teclu”, Bucureşti

1
 Contents

PART I INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................. 3

CHAPTER I THE PARADIGMATIC CONSTRUCTION OF CHARACTER ........................... 23
1.1 The realist, modernist and postmodernist paradigms .......................................................... 23
1.2 Postmodernist characters in search of an author .................................................................. 31
CHAPTER II: THE POSTMODERNIST CHARACTER IN THE WORKS OF JOHN.............. 35
FOWLES AND DAVID LODGE ................................................................................................. 35
2.1 Analysis of postmodernist character in the french lieutenant`s woman and nice work....... 35
2.2 Multiple identity................................................................................................................... 49
2.3 The use of intertextuality ..................................................................................................... 53
2.4 The relation narrator-character ............................................................................................ 58
CONCLUSIONS............................................................................................................................ 64
PART II: TEACHING POSTMODERNIST CHARACTER ............................................................ 67
CHAPTER III: WHY TEACH LITERATURE? ........................................................................... 67
CHAPTER IV: JOHN FOWLES AND DAVID LODGE IN CLASS .......................................... 73
LESSON PLAN 1 (teaching contradictory features of postmodernist character) ......................... 78
LESSON PLAN 2 (teaching postmodernist characters` development) ......................................... 80
LESSON PLAN 3 (fallen woman in Victorian England) .............................................................. 82
APPENDIX 1 ................................................................................................................................. 85
APPENDIX 2 ................................................................................................................................. 87
APPENDIX 3 ................................................................................................................................. 89
Works cited .................................................................................................................................... 91

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 PART I INTRODUCTION

1. General presentation of the postmodern condition and its history in relation to modernism.
2. Postmodernist theories regarding identity
3. Main themes of postmodernist literature in relation with character development

As postmodernism is viewed as a contradictory phenomenon, covering different areas of society,

from architecture, literature, art, philosophy to economy, politics, it seems rather difficult to try to
give a clear definition of it especially if we consider `the pluralist and fragmented culture` of the
western world today. (Hutcheon 1988, 3)
Although it happens especially in Europe and the Americas, it is a part of the modern but not its
end, as` modernity, in whatever age it appears, cannot exist without a shattering of belief and
without discovery of the lack of reality, together with the invention of other realities`(Lyotard, 77).
Lyotard distinguishes between three meanings of the term `postmodern`. First there is an aesthetic
sense of the term postmodernism with reference to the developments in the arts, architecture and
painting. Here postmodernism signifies a break with modernism although he is unwilling to place a
postmodernist stage totally different from the period of modernism and involving a fundamental
historical and cultural break with it. He characterizes postmodernism as a cyclical moment that
reappears before the emergence of new modernisms.
`Postmodernism is undoubtedly a part of the modern. It is not modernism at its end .It is an increase
of being and the jubilation which result from the invention of new rules` (Lyotard, 80).
Modernism was initiated by defenders of the classical tradition, describing an aesthetic and cultural
movement or mood in all arts. Although modernist aesthetic forms seem to lack unity they share
some features and tendencies such as creating a sense of unfamiliarity, disturbance and shock to the

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reader, observer or audience. In this sense modernism constitutes a response to late nineteenth
changes regarding sense perception and self-consciousness which arouse from two main sources:
the change in space-time orientation associated with major innovations in communication and the
second one concerns `the crisis in self-consciousness` arising from the erosion of the beliefs and
values. (Smart, 153)
Modernism emphasizes movement and flux and the absolute present `now` and it is a constant
struggle against everything that has been before. At the same time it refuses to accept any limits.
Although modernism as an innovative cultural movement is considered to be exhausted, its effects
continue to contribute to the cultural contradictions of contemporary capitalism (Smart, 154). This
exhaustion of modernism is understood as a process of familiarization, acceptance as a consequence
of the development of mass cultural forms and practices. The innovative and creative impulses have
become predictable.
Modernity has often been described as essentially progressive and the instabilities, forms of
disorganization, risks and dangers that might be regarded as the crisis tendencies, have been
described as temporary or transitional. In other words the problems of modernity could have been
remedied through increasing knowledge about social life and institutions which are oriented to the
constitution of a new, more highly evolved or progressive social order. (Smart, 11)
The condition of knowledge is the second sense that he associates with the term `postmodern`
outlining the main transformations identified in the way in which forms of knowledge are
`legitimated`. The growing importance of language in a sociocultural and economic context
transformed by the increasing amount of information and implicitly communication led to changes
in the conditions of knowledge and social life.
Lyotard suggests that there are some factors which essentially contributed to the emergence of the
postmodern condition of knowledge. The first concerns the development, since the end of World
War II, of the postindustrial techniques and technologies, which have contributed to the shift of
emphasis away from questions concerning the intrinsic value of forms of knowledge.
The second factor identified is the regeneration of the capitalist way of production which `valorised
the individual enjoyment of goods and services` (Lyotard, 38).
Lyotard argues that postindustrial technological transformations have affected both the scientific
research and ` the way learning is acquired, classified, made available and exploited`(Lyotard1984,
4). The conclusion is that knowledge could not remain unchanged after all these technological

4
transformations and research became increasingly oriented towards the needs of clients. Knowledge
came to be produced in order to be sold.
The third and final sense that Lyotard gives to the term `postmodern` represents a response to the
political implications of the end of avant-gardism, the progress associated with the issue of lack of a
secure place from which to create oppositional forms of thought and politics. (Smart,176). On the
other hand that does not mean the abandonment of rationality, but rather `a critical interrogation of
reason` or a critical reflection on the project of modernity and its rationalities (Smart,181).
During the eighteenth century the idea of progress linked to the natural evolutionary process of
human development was extended from the area of knowledge to the more general social and
material conditions of the human being. These two aspects, of an increasing improvement in
knowledge and social, moral and material advance, have been central to nineteenth and twentieth
century analyses of modern social life, processes of social change and social future visions (Smart,
12).
For a better understanding of this social process of change we should make the distinction between
industrial and postindustrial society as Barry Smart does in the work `Modern conditions,
postmodern controversies`. Industrial societies are goods producers and their economic growth
depends on employing the latest machine technology. One of their strategic resources is the
financial capital. We have here a society where the introduction of the machine technology
increases the division of labour and transforms work.
On the other hand, postindustrial societies are especially based on services. As they employ
intellectual technology, their focus is on the `codification of theoretical knowledge` (Smart, 12).
The emphasis is on the scientific, technical and professional forms of employment. Again the work
is transformed but the effects are different. There is an increase in the displacement of many forms
of work and employment as a consequence of the introduction of technologies of automation in the
production process, as well as an apparent growing requirement for professional workers who have
the necessary training and education in order to provide services on demand in the post-industrial
society. As a consequence, the service and the blue collar worker are the coming out in a society
which is increasingly concerned with the quality of life, education and recreation.
The new attitude towards a good life has caused a shift to the community and less emphasis on the
individuals and their interests. Within a post-industrial society it is not the market or the demands of
individuals that can influence the choice of services but the community and the public mechanisms

5
(Smart, 37). In a post-industrial society the distinction between social classes is of less importance
rather than that between powers of decision making in organizations and those subject to their
authority. A communal society is more ready to accept the rights of minority groups and is more
sensitive to the necessity that the government exercise its power of decision over the actions of
private corporations and that the individuals protect the community and its environment.(Smart,37)
The great impact of technology and accelerating speed of social change have been definitely the
features of Western civilization, representative for the modern age and the innovations in the power
of production technologies have fundamentally transformed experiences of time and
space.(Smart,165)
In a computerized society representative for highly developed societies there are trasformations of
knowledge which have effect on public power and civil institutions.
In this sense Lyotard focuses on the status of science and technology and the control of knowledge
and information nowadays.
The development of industrial capitalism has generated a high living standard for large categories
of people but not without paying a price.
`The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take .We have paid
a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one , for the reconciliation of the concept
and the sensible of the transparent and the communicable experience.`(Lyotard, 81-82)
Lyotard refers to a fully communicational society, a society which has moved from the industrial
age to the information age. In postmodernity people are invaded with information and technology
has become central in their lives.
In ` Modern conditions, postmodern controversies`, Barry Smart speaks about these costs that the
`formation of the modern nation state ` has faced .Forms of inequality, increasing fears and
insecurities arising from modern forms of life, problems with funding, organization and operational
key social institutions (such as education, health and welfare) are some aspects which led to a
change in the mentality of the individual towards community and environment. (Smart, 3)
The increasing development of information as well as the growing use of communication systems
have raised fears regarding the perspective of extensive forms of surveillance and, as a
consequence, a future erosion of personal privacy. (Smart, 57)
The new electronic technologies transform the scale, structure and style of human activities and
relationships, through an extension of senses and capacity.

6
Automation is a way of thinking as much as it is a way of doing and its effects go beyond
production and consumption.
Linda Hutcheon points out the importance of visual arts in a postmodern media and consumer
society because the image is the force that creates `thought and everyday life`. In a highly speed-up
media and consumer society the still and quiet images of painting and photography can show the
role of image in the media and generates critical insights. The postmodern artist like Kruger uses
images and text to promote a reflection on the messages of the media and consumer society.
Pop art exposes the role of image in reproducing capitalist culture and the reduction of art, culture
style and identity to image. The images in pop art highlight the spectacle of the media and the
commercial culture where everything is for sale.
Postmodernism has also been synonymous with an immense process of destruction of meaning. The
paradox is that means of communication such as mass media have had the reverse effect: there is
more and more information and less and less meaning. Step by step, mass media has neutralized
reality, first by reflecting it, then `masking the reality and then masking the absence of reality. What
postmodern art works do is to problematize the representation of reality` (Hutcheon 1988, 230).
The process of social change, the capitalist economic practice and scientific forms of knowledge
were believed to have weakened the fabric of social life. To that extent the emerging modern era,
lacking stability and order, was considered to be intrinsically regressive. As we have seen so far it
has also brought a shift to a more individualistic, impersonal kind of society. The increasing choice
in the area of economic production and consumption suggests that the postmodern society might be
approaching a point of `over choice`, where the advantages of diversity and individualization are
cancelled by the buyer`s decision-making process (Smart, 71).
Postmodernism is characterized by the increasing tendency to uniformize the mass culture, which
looks for difference, not homogenous identity ( Hutcheon 1988 , 6).
Although the postmodern age has proved to be a time of social, political , economic and discursive
shifts, it does not represent a radical break with systems, structures and meanings of the past.
People do not live in an entirely abstract and changed environment, on the contrary they are
temporally limited as well as socially located human beings.
Moreover postmodernism creates greater diversity of cultures, small groups within a larger society
which maintain their cultural identity. The changes we have seen managed to introduce a diversity
of styles, values and subcultures, an abundance of selves, identities and forms of subjectivity,

7
creating problems of both social and individual integration. In this context it can only account for
the failure of coalitions and the fragmentation of interests. Fragmentation and centralism, isolation
of the moment and detachment are synonymous with a mechanical age. Many of the anxieties of
this age derive from the inability to keep up with the flow of changes and information which have
invaded the postmodern society. (Smart, 115)
The image of modernity depicts a world in which survival is constantly threatened by changes
which have the power to destroy the achievements of personal integrity and interpersonal relations
.On the other hand, the modern experience provides individuals with opportunities for development
of their own capacities. These capacities are manifested through a process of reclaiming the public
sphere for private uses; individuals find means of expressing themselves through the same forces
that threaten them. This is a process has produced great works of art as constructive outcomes of
human possibility. (Frosh, 21-22)
Postmodernism renegotiates the borders between the public and the personal experience and aims to
replace the individualistic idealism with institutional analysis (Hutcheon 1988, 202).
It is extremely interesting to analyze the importance of the individual in this type of society and
how the changes that have been described above influence possible actions or shape identity.
In the humanistic tradition the individual is considered an autonomous being, possessing self-
knowledge and belief in progress and continuous self improvement. An understanding or
knowledge of natural and social reality depended on a unity of reason and observation, made
possible by the practice of scientific methods of inquiry. Through a rigorous investigation of events
it was assumed that there would emerge not only an understanding of the order of things, but also
new social technologies necessary to achieve a more advanced form of society.
With postmodernism the universally valid ideas of the liberal humanist tradition are contested and
the individual is an object of inquiry (Hutcheon 1988, 187). Within the capitalist frame the
individual is losing his unique value, being dispersed through the process of mass manipulation
(Hutcheon 1997, 18).
The realist understanding of the link between facts and values came from the belief that humans
were able to generate knowledge as a result of their cognitive capacities and historical and social
locations. In other words, humans can develop reliable knowledge about their world and about how
and where they fit into that world. The realist theory is also sympathetic to the postmodern view

8
regarding identity but there have been noticed differences in regarding experience as a starting point
for knowledge. (Moya, 272)
Identity and the importance of individual agency are best explained by attitude toward experience.
The realist account of experience claims that experience can yield reliable and genuine knowledge.
The central idea is that experience of social subjects has a cognitive component. Experiences can be
`true ` or `false`, can be evaluated or justified in relation to the subject and his world, as experience
means simply the different ways in which humans understand information (Moya, 32). The realist
theory of identity, in contrast to a postmodernist one, claims that the individual acknowledges the
consequences- socially, politically or economically - of social location. In order to do this, he first
acknowledges the reality of those social categories (race, class, etc.) that make up an individual`s
social location. He does not need to see these categories as something uncontestable to
acknowledge their ontological status. He does need to admit that they have real material effects.
(Moya, 30)
The postmodernist view of experience is totally different, admitting that it is not a reliable source of
knowledge and cannot be seen as grounding a social identity. As postmodernists consider personal
experiences as rather unstable and slippery they point out that experience does not constitute a
foundation for social actions. (Moya, 31) This is a denial of individual agency, on the grounds that
common experiences of the group take priority over the unknown or unique experiences of the
individual. The individuality is so permeated by sociality that there is no way of resisting on an
individual level at all. (Frosh, 21-22)
Lyotard also points out that `a self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in
a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before`(Lyotard, 15).
Identities are theoretical constructions that enable us to read the world in specific ways. In them and
through them, we learn to define and reshape our values. As theories through which humans
interpret their theories vary from individual to individual, from time to time and from situation to
situation there are different interpretations of the same kind of event. It follows that an individual
understanding of the world can be explained more or less accurately through his cultural identity.
In the work Reclaiming Identity, Paula Moya distinguishes between two types of identities: the
public identity, the external one which is visible and under only the individual control. The second
type is called `subjectivity` and refers to the inner life and experiences (Moya, 336).

9
Western common sense claims that the individual has more control over his subjectivity than over
his public identity. But without a social space in which the individual can operate as a free, moral,
decision-making agent, the individual cannot become a moral agent. Real identities are linked to
locations in which experience and perception occur and where an individual acts. This mediation of
self performed by social context leads to the postmodernist idea that the constructed nature of
experience does not have self evident meanings, for they are in fact theoretical affairs. Our access to
our personal feelings is dependent on our social context and ideologies. When we choose among
these alternative ways of organizing experience, we make a purely arbitrary choice, determined by
our social locations or our ideological commitments. This is the reason to believe that experience is
unstable and unreliable.(Moya , 35) This also leads to further postmodernist ideas such as the
impossibility of objectivity, that it is irrelevant to explain the moral growth or change because they
are not real and can never be justified as long as they are tied to experience (Moya, 32).
Postmodernists are unable to explain what would actually motivate someone to reexamine and
change their self understanding and identity. Because they are reluctant to admit that identities refer
outward to our shared world, they see all identities as arbitrary and unconnected to social and
economic structures.
`Postmodern discourses offer a collective, historicized context for individual action. They do not
deny the individual but they do situate him. And they do not deny that collectivity can be perceived
as manipulation as well as activism` (Hutcheon 1988, 6).
On the basis of the understanding of experience in postmodernism we can extend the idea of
cultural identity and conclude that `postmodern culture does not deny the liberal humanist culture,
but it contests it from within its own assumptions` (Hutcheon1988, 6).
This interrogation of the epistemic leads to a repression of alternative sources of experience and
value. Unlike the belief in the possible existence of a self as a central component of the way
modernism is reasoning, postmodernism suggests that the illusion of selfhood allows appeals to an
unchanging human nature and a source of potential resistance. Postmodernism, by taking part in the
deconstruction of the self, opposes all tendencies to take refuge in any illusion of wholeness even in
aesthetic forms. (Frosh, 21-22)
The emergence of a powerful current of postmodernism is associated with a number of events and
developments which are traced to the 1960`s. In this sense Hutcheon points out that it is related to

10
the economic (late capitalist) and ideological (liberal humanist) dominants of its time (Hutcheon
1988, xiii).
As there was the need for a new era in literature after modernism had exhausted itself
`postmodernism may mark the site of the struggle of the emergence of something new`(Hutcheon
1988, 4).
If postmodernism was first created in a literary context to express a continuation of the
experimentation championed by writers of the modernist period, a conservative reaction within
modernism and against Enlightenment ideas, it initially became visible in an architectural setting.
But the term has also spread in other contexts and has been invoked to distinguish a historical
period, an aesthetic style and a change in the condition of knowledge (Smart, 164).
It is a rich and creative movement whose most important features are the break with the older
modernism, a general tendency towards superficiality, instabilities and contradictions.
These contradictions are not meant to be resolved, on the contrary, challenging and questioning are
considered positive due to the belief that they may be the only possible condition of change
(Hutcheon 1988, 8). This interrogation of the way of thinking has contributed to the `crisis in
legitimation`, which made Lyotard conclude that it is an effect in the postmodern condition. When
technology enters the artist`s area it produces a fragmentation of cultures, a diversity of cultures,
values, identities or forms of subjectivity. There is no intention to reach an agreement of conflicts
but to undermine and foreground them. (Hutcheon 1988, 47) Diversity and ambivalence are
dominant for most of the issues raised by postmodernism which never offers answers and refuses to
solve contradictions. For the postmodernist, there is no ordering system so a search for order is
useless. Hence the belief in such an ordering system behind the chaos of the world is perceived as
paranoia. Perhaps demonstrated most effectively in Joseph Heller`s Catch 22 and the works of
Thomas Pynchon, the sense of paranoia, the belief that there is an ordering system behind the chaos
of the world claims that a search for order is useless and absurd.
`The postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he
produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules and they cannot be judged according
to a determining judgement ,by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules
and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer, then, are
working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done` (Lyotard, 81).

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The postmodern turn in art maintains some links to the earlier aesthetic traditions while also
breaking sharply from high modernism. Postmodernism and postmodernity are rarely differentiated
from modernism and modernity and within aesthetic, philosophical and sociological discourse there
has been a tendency to define the postmodern as a part of the modern. The idea that the postmodern
signifies a cultural development which remains broadly within the frame of modernism is shared by
Lyotard who sees it as `undoubtedly a part of the modern` (Lyotard, 79).
Although postmodernism is generally perceived as a break, as a new current there are few
`postmodern elements that are completely new or innovative. Critics have characterized
postmodernism in terms of its ontological indeterminacy, the loss of a world that could be accepted
(McHalle, 26).
`Postmodernism may be the expression of a culture in crisis, but it is not in itself any revolutionary
breakthrough` (Hutcheon 1988, 230).
Modernism believed in permanent artistic experimentation and innovation whereas
postmodernism`s novelty is based on a new mixture of old forms and devices and therefore a return
to history (Bottez, 230).
`In the absence of aesthetic criteria it remains possible and useful to asses the value of works of art
according to the profits they yield` (Lyotard, 76). In the invitations to suspend artistic
experimentation, there is a call for order, a desire for unity, for identity as well as for security.
Artists and writers must be brought back into community. Lyotard explains the process of
transformation, the shift to postmodernism by referring to Enlightenment idea of unitary history and
subject.
The visual arts are especially important in a postmodern media and consumer society because the
image is the force that creates thought. In postmodernity people have to face much information,
technology has become a central focus in many lives and their understanding of the real is mediated
by simulations of the real. In a society which has moved past the industrial age into the information
age there is a shift into hiperreality in which simulations have replaced the real. Brian McHalle
notices an affinity of postmodernist and modernist fiction for cinema and more recently for
television as a serious source of inspiration. On the other hand there are some differences in the way
the two make use of it. For modernism the movies served as a source for new techniques of
representation while in postmodernism it appears at the ontological level as a world within the
world, in which reality is replaced by the `miniature escape` of television (McHalle, 128). Many

12
works of fiction have dealt with this aspect of postmodernity. For instance , in White Noise by Don
DeLillo characters are bombarded with the `white noise` of television, product brand names and
clichés like a mix of modern technology and Victorian culture.
Introduced in the text`s ontological structure, the movies serve as the background for foregrounding
postmodernism`s ontological themes, including the theme of control or mass-manipulation
(McHalle, 130).
`What postmodern art works do is to problematize the representation of reality` (Hutcheon 1988,
223).
On the other hand these acts of defamiliarization are believed to only have a temporary effect.
Literature is not wholly autonomous; it is not completely isolated from the world it exists in. Far
reaching social changes must have had consequences for the course of literary history (Bertens
2001, 43). For instance, with the disappearance of the medieval world of heroic knights, the long
narrative poems that presents heroic events and quests became old fashioned .In Miguel Cervantes`
Don Quixote such a knight has become the object of ridicule. As a consequence, the mechanism of
defamiliarization cannot say anything about the nature of the devices that will be replaced. All it
tells us is that change is inevitable (Bertens 2001, 46).
Defining a term which includes a wide range of developments in philosophy, film, architecture, art,
literature and culture, postmodernism originally appeared as a reaction to modernism and its ideas
and responses to technological advances. It is both a combination of the experimentation
championed by writers of the modernist period and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas in
modernist literature.
The postmodern turn in literature appeared as a reaction to the forms of modernism, against the
original, innovative style of modernists like Kafka, Hemingway, Joyce, Eliot or Pound. On the
other hand, both modern and postmodern break with the nineteenth century realism, the objective
and omniscient point of view. Postmodern term can be used at least in two ways- firstly, to give a
label to the period after 1968 which would cover all forms of fiction, both innovative and
traditional), and secondly, to describe highly experimental literature produced by writers beginning
with Lawrence Durrell and John Fowels in the 1960s.
An important distinction between modernist and postmodernist fiction is noticed by Brian McHalle
in his work The Postmodernist Fiction. The epistemological question `What am I in this world? ` is
dominant throughout the modernist works while the postmodernist fiction relates to ontological

13
questions (McHalle, 9-10). Thus the process of changing from modernism to postmodernism
involves backgrounding the epistemology, a shift from problems of knowing to problems of ways
of being. Chapter 8 of Absalom! Absalom! is one example of this change.
Fragmentariness is a common theme reflected especially in narrative structure and character
construction. Style in modernist fiction is foregrounded in two different ways: as an epistemological
function in order to serve as a representation of the character`s consciousness or to express a
displaced consciousness (McHalle, 149). In modernist literature it is a sign of existential crisis, an
internal conflict meant to be solved by the artist himself.
Brian McHalle speaks about nostalgia for a type of fiction in which the focus is upon the order of
things. Fragmentariness produces the effect of the` plurality of discourses`, in which more language
registers and stylistic features are used. Modernist texts integrate the multiple worlds of discourse
into a single ontological structure or at least they try unify these worlds (McHalle, 166).
Logical continuity is specific to the realist discourse, which aims at persuading the reader of the
veridicity of its facts.
What modernism does is to reject the conventions of realism, its narrative forms and its belief in a
transparent discourse of reality. It replaces the traditional plot unity with myth patterns (Bottez,
136). The continuity of the modernist text is thus achieved by the metaphoric and mythical patterns
and motifs. For example, Eliot (and other modernist writers in their works) uses the myth and
brings it to the present in order to unify the structure of the poem `The Waste Land` in spite of the
tendencies of disintegration of the text. On the other hand, the notes have the opposite effects; they
complicate the form of the poem by introducing another type of discourse (McHalle,166).
Postmodernism carries the modernist revolution of the rejection of the linearity in the realist plot by
seemingly returning to story telling; it rejects another old traditional principle of rhetoric and
literary narrative, that of logical non-contradiction (Bottez, 153).
Characteristic of postmodernist writing is what Brian McHalle calls `the deliberate nonfluency`, in
which the constructions of the sentences go so far as ungrammaticality. The effect is to disturb the
reader`s attention from the content of the text by the sentence structure itself. `The action fades and
we are left facing the words on the words on the page; this happens again and again in
postmodernism writing`. (McHalle, 148)

14
Even though there are some modern and particularly postmodern narratives which strive to escape
the traditional linear order, this is done partially as it would lead to total misunderstanding
(Bottez,142).
Postmodern works `challenge narrative singularity and unity in the name of multiplicity and
disparity. Through narrative they offer fictive corporality instead of abstractions, but at the same
time, they do tend to fragment or at least to render unstable the traditional unified identity or
subjectivity of character`(Hutchon 1988, 90).
There are some representative works which have been cited as having a great influence on
postmodernism or being a means of distinguishing between modern and postmodern literature.
Laurence Sterne`s 1759 novel has announced future postmodernist elements with its emphasis on
parody and narrative experimentation. We will later find fragmentariness in narrative in The Waste
Land as well as the speaker`s explanation `these fragments I have shored against my ruins`.
Modernist literature sees fragmentation and extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis, a problem
that must be solved and the artist is often cited as the one to solve it. But the notions of subjective
consciousness and continuity are being questioned. Postmodernists often see the artist as impotent
and the only thing to do against `ruin` is to play within the chaos. For the postmodernist artist it is
impossible to overcome this condition .The only thing he can do is to play with the chaos.
Playfulness is present in many modernist works (Joyce`s Finnegans Wake or Virginia Woolf`s
Orlando) but for postmodernists playfulness becomes central.
By the 1960`s there was a feeling of exhaustion in the arts, the impression that what had to be
expressed had already been expressed and all that could be done had already been done. The search
for the new and original that had characterized modernism gave way to a feeling of ending. There
was nothing left for the postmodernist artist but to play with the pieces of the past and rearrange
them in different forms.
`Modernists like Eliot and Joyce have been seen as profoundly humanistic in their paradoxical
desire for stable aesthetic and moral values…Postmodernism differs from this, not in its humanistic
contradictions, but in…its response to them; it refuses to posit any structure`(Hutcheon 1988, 6).
Any kind of consensus is an illusion in postmodernity. Challenging and questioning are considered
positive, deriving from the belief that they may be the only possible condition of change (Hutcheon
1988, 8).

15
The interrogation in the way of thinking, all these contradictions are not meant to be resolved; they
are held in an ironic tension. One of the consequences of the postmodern inquiry into the nature of
subjectivity is the attitude to traditional notions of perspective. The subject is no longer a coherent,
meaningful entity. Narrators become either multiple and hard to locate or limited, undermining their
own omnipresence. (Hutcheon 1988, 11)
Lyotard explains this decline of narrative as the effects of the advanced liberal capitalism after the
Second World War and the expansion of techniques and technologies in the postindustrial society
(Lyotard, 37). On the other hand, on the political and social levels, the narrative has always meant a
reaction against capitalism. This is a sign, in Lyotard`s view, that there is something different now
and beyond capitalism. He further explains the process of transformation, the shift to
postmodernism referring to the Enlightenment idea of unitary end of history and of a subject .In his
view capitalism inherently possesses the power to derealize familiar objects, social roles and
institutions to such a degree that the so called realistic representations can no longer evoke reality
except as nostalgia or mockery.
What postmodernism does is specifying the context by the individual`s response to his society.
Thus postmodernism goes beyond reflexivity, which was specific to modernism, with placing the
discourse in a context. One of the most popular postmodernist ways and effective strategies of
reaction is parody which sets up a relation between identification and distance.
The postmodernist writers headed to a more accessible writing style and the concept of the author
as a unitary consciousness was replaced with the writing subject in a socially constructed field. The
inaccessibility, the fact that they spoke directly to the reader, made postmodern novels best-sellers.
The novel is more radical in form because it assumes that its readers already know the conventions
of the realist novel. The postmodernist writing also strives to be accessible through its historical and
reflexive forms whose aim is to parody and interrogate them.
Contrary to the modernist concern with atemporality and its interest in the archetypal,
postmodernism returns to history but only to question it. In Linda Hutchon`s view history is
represented by official documents, reports, private documents or letters and other recording forms
that are reinterpreted each time with every new historian, losing their authenticity value. This being
revealed to the reader, made her put forth the term historiographic metafiction for postmodernist
historical narratives.

16
Although postmodern fiction does not break up with history, it goes back to it in order to contest its
power to represent and explain reality. In its view the historical documents are extremely unstable
sources of identity (Hutcheon 1997, 86). For example, in The French Lieutenant`s Woman Fowles
evokes the social and literary history specific to the Victorian period through some footnotes which
expand on the habits, vocabulary as well as Victorian political and social practices. Sometimes a
note is used to translate some expressions as is assumed that the modern readers are unable to
translate them from Latin as their predecessors used to. This is an ironical approach, in contrast
with Laurence Sterne`s view in Tristam Shandy whose readers share a certain educational
background (Hutheon 1997, 89).
Postmodernist fiction has been called many times the death of the novel because it ceases to reflect
reality, in other words ` is offered as another of the discourses by which we construct our versions
of reality, and both the construction and the need for it are what are foregrounded in the
postmodernist novel`(Hutcheon 1988, 40). Unlike defamiliarization, which would not seem to
affect its immediate textual environment, foregrounding has the effect that it `automatizes`
neighbouring textual elements. It draws the reader`s attention to itself and obscures whatever else
may be going on right beside it (Bertens 2001, 73). Foregrounded style can work as an
epistemological function in order to serve as a representation of the character`s consciousness or to
express a displaced consciousness (McHalle, 149). In many realist and modernist novels such as
Wuthering Heights or Lord Jim it is rather the epistemological dimension which is foregrounded,
each narrative level being in fact a link which leads to another level of narration (McHalle, 114) . In
postmodernist texts it is the ontological dimension which is foregrounded.
The twentieth century writers like to shock the reader. Displeasure is a way of shocking the reader
because the effect is drawing his/her attention. As a result reading can be either like watching a
movie or difficult because it makes you part of the creation.
References to the death of literature or the death of the novel and the death of the author called for
new forms of writing and culture. One indication of postmodernism`s lack of originality, the
adoption of styles and the reliance on cliches is given by the focus in the study of postmodern
literature on intertextuality, the relation between a text and another.It not only the individual literary
work that can be seen as a system, as a structure in which everything is interrelated and
interdependent, but literature as a whole can be seen in those terms. The individual texts position
themselves with reference to other individual texts, to the genre they belong to (Bertens 2001, 42).

17
With postmodernism intertextuality becomes a fundamental defining feature which developed a
very well known form, parody. Although is not new in postmodernism, having been used since the
beginning of the eighteenth century in the English novel, it was less cultivated in Victorian times. Is
was only in the twentieth century when it started to be successfully used in Joyce`s novels, where
the story and the characters are parodied in an elaborate way by comparing them with the
archetypal heroic patterns based primarily on the Odyssey. (Bottez, 228)
There are many references to fairy tales but many contradictory texts parody them (Hutchon 1988,
11). The notions of originality, authenticity are undermined. The new style of writing, self reflexive
broke with realist theories of mimesis, depth psychology and character development. Its characters
are typically empty, depthless, aimless. Instead of deep context, great themes and moral lessons,
postmodernists are interested in the form and play of languages and adopt ironic, self reflexive,
metafictional tehniques.
Lyotard considers that the forms of popular sayings, proverbs and maxims,`which have continued
to circulate on certain levels of the contemporary social edifice` bear the mark of temporalization,
as a rule of the knowledge `never forget`. He further explains that a collectivity which takes great
importance in the narratives, does need to remember its past; it finds the raw material for its social
bond not only in the meaning of the narratives but also in the act of reciting them. From this point
of view, the narrative reference seems to belong to the past, but in reality it is always
contemporaneous with the act of recalling. (Lyotard, 22)
Metafiction is essentially writing about writing to undermine the authority of the author, for
unexpected narrative shifts, to advance a story in a unique way, for emotional distance or to
comment on the act of storytelling. For instance, Kurt Vonnegut commonly used this technique; the
first chapter of his novel Slaughter house five is about the process of writing the novel and calls
attention to his own presence throughout the novel. Though much of the novel has to do with
Vonnegut`s own experiences during the firebombing of Dresden, Vonnegut continually points out
the artificiality of the central narrative which contains obviously fantastic elements such as aliens
and time travel.
Linda Hutcheon claimed postmodern fiction as a whole could be characterized by the ironic quote
marks. This irony, along with black humour and the general concept of `play` are among the most
recognizable aspects of postmodernism. Though the idea of employing these devices in literature

18
did not start with postmodernists (the modernists were also playful and ironic), they became central
in many postmodern works.
Instead of innovation and originality, postmodernists developed techniques like pastish and parody.
Playfulness is a central technique in postmodernist narratives as it is common for postmodernists to
treat serious subjects in a playful and humorous way. Writers such as Heller, Vonnegut or Pynchon
make considerable use of the events of World War II to parody them. The central concept of Joseph
Heller`s Catch 22 is the irony of the new idiomatic `catch 22` and the narrative is structured around
a series of similar ironies. Thomas Pynchon in particular provides examples of playfulness, often
including silly wordplay within a serious context.
Rather than developing the themes regarding selfhood, originality and inventing new materials, the
postmodern artist parodies them, quoting from the past and combining fragments in a pastiche. The
classic realist fiction is usually the aim of parody without preserving the dominant of the original as
in the case of stylization (McHalle, 21).
Parody is central in postmodernism. The terms of originality and value are put into question. It is
not a mark of postmodernism as it was also used in modernist art, namely in the writings of T.S.
Eliot, Thomas Mann and James Joyce or in Picasso, Manet and Magritte`s paintings. There are
differences in the final impact of the two ways of using parody. It is not that modernists were more
serious and postmodernists are more ironic, but it is about modernism`s rejection and distance that
we do not meet in postmodernist parody (Hutcheon 1997,105).
Brian McHalle mentions the fact that there is a tension between past and present as well as an
ontological tension between official and apocryphal versions of the world. This is used as a way of
foregrounding the temporal distance between the act of narration and the object narrated in The
French Lieutenant`s Woman by Fowles. The narrator attributes to Sarah, the novel`s heroine, the
attitudes and psychology of a modern, late twentieth century woman. Sarah stands for the first
`glimmerings` of modern sensibility in Victorian culture and progress (McHalle, 93).
`What postmodern does, as its very name suggests, is confront and contest any modernist discarding
or recuperating of the past in the name of the future`(Hutcheon 1988,19).
Lyotard makes an interesting distinction between story telling and scientific abstraction in relation
with history. These two forms of knowledge are related to temporality and particularly to the
retention of the past. Narrative, by its formal properties of traditional tales, is characterized as a way
of consuming the past, a way of forgetting since time is no longer a support for memory.

19
`as meter takes precedence over accent in the production of sound (spoken or not), time ceases to be
a support for memory to became an immemorial beating, that, in the absence of a noticeable
separation between periods, prevents their being numbered and consigns them to oblivion`(Lyotard,
22).
The modern interest for great and original work is replaced with the postmodern irony and play, a
commitment to surface and superficial.
Postmodernist literature as a whole renews itself through the development of new genres, while
genres defamiliarize themselves through the introduction of some techniques and materials taken
from other genres or popular culture. It is also known as experimental literature produced by writers
beginning with John Fowles in the 1960s. As a result the term `postmodernist` has been used for
experimental writers. Postmodernists often combine more elements and genres and create pastiche.
To combine more elements can be seen both as a parody of the past styles as well as representation
of the chaotic and pluralistic aspects of postmodern society. A combination of multiple genres can
aim at creating a unique narrative or at commenting on different situations in postmodernity.
Though pastiche usually refers to the mixing of genres, many other elements are also included
(metafiction and temporal distortion are common in the postmodern novel). Thomas Pynchon is one
example of writers who include and combine in their novels elements from detective fiction,
science fiction, war fiction, songs, pop culture references, real contemporary and historical figures
(eg. Mickey Rourke, Wernher von Braun). Another notable example in this sense would be
Margaret Atwood who makes use of elements from science fiction and fairy tales in her novels.
There has been a tendency for postmodernist writing to borrow motifs and settings from science
fiction writing. Science fiction is for postmodernism what detective fiction was for modernism
(McHalle, 16). Postmodernist writing has preferred to adapt science motifs of temporal
displacement rather than its spatial displacement projecting worlds of the future .In constructing
future worlds, postmodernist writing tends to focus on social and institutional innovations rather
than on technological developments which are in fact typically associated with science fiction
(McHalle, 51). For instance, George Orwell creates a grim dystopia in his novel `1984`, projecting
his political beliefs into a future, dystopian world called Oceania after having witnessed the dangers
of absolute political authority in an age of advanced technology. Unlike a utopian novel, in which
the writer aims to portray the perfect human society, a novel of negative utopia does the exact
opposite: it shows the worst human society, in an effort to convince readers to avoid any path that

20
might lead to such a degradation of society. In 1949, at the dawn of the nuclear age and before the
television had become addictive in the family home, Orwell`s vision of a post-atomic dictatorship
in which every individual would be monitored by means of the telescreen seemed terrifyingly
possible. This world projected into the future is an alarm against the abusive nature of authoritarian
governments as well as an analysis of the psychology of power and the ways that manipulations of
language can be used as mechanisms of control.
Temporal distortion is a common technique in modernist fiction; fragmentation and non-linear
narratives are central features in both modern and postmodern literature. Temporal distortion in
postmodern fiction is used in a variety of ways, often for the sake of irony but at the same time it
provides the fictional frame for slippages between one identity and another. Distortions in time are
central features in many of Kurt Vonnegut`s non linear novels, the most famous of which is perhaps
Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five becoming `unstuck in time`.
Dystopias or Utopias, the postmodernist worlds of the future typically project a future time but
without bridging the temporal gap between present and future; that bridge is left for the reader to
build (McHalle, 51).
Postmodernist fictions often strive to displace common knowledge, automatic associations. In this
way they parody the encyclopedia.
Science fiction, like postmodernist fiction, is dominated by the ontological elements. It places
different worlds in confrontation, foregrounds their structures and the differences between them.
Postmodernist fiction has close affinities with the genre of the fantastic as there functions the dual
ontology: on the one hand our normal, ordinary world, and the world of the paranormal on the other
hand (McHalle, 73).
A text belongs properly to the fantastic genre as long as it contains natural and supernatural
elements and explanations. Brian McHale claims that the fantastic disappeared in the twentieth
century literature as a consequence of the lack of representation in contemporary writing. The
fantastic involves a confrontation and hesitation between the real and the impossible. Characters
usually fail to be amazed by supernatural events; as a result, in the absence of a character to do the
hesitating, it is the reader who is to do it. (McHalle, 74-75)
The postmodern turn generated a new attitude and global culture in different fields (architecture,
painting, media, literature, consumer culture). The global nature of postmodern cultural forms is
undoubtful. Much of the world lives in a mixture of the traditional, modern and postmodern,

21
experiencing the breakdown of the modern theory, culture and society and the emergence of new
postmodern forms.

22
CHAPTER I THE PARADIGMATIC CONSTRUCTION OF CHARACTER

1.1 The Realist, Modernist and Postmodernist Paradigms

As we have seen at the first half of the twentieth century, in Western society, the philosophical and
political views in which the autonomy of the subject is taken for granted is central to the liberal
humanist view of the individual, or the subject. Liberal humanism assumes that all of us are
essentially free and that we have created ourselves, to some extent, through our own experiences.
Owing to that freedom, the individual is permanently considered a source of the value and the
meaning he gives to the things by his own actions (Bertens 2001, 6). As liberal subjects, they are
not the only result of their experiences but can somehow stay outside it. Instead the individual is the
outcome of the self which has been and remained there stable and autonomous.
Starting from these assumptions, in much of Western literature, individuals are portrayed within
this frame (Bertens 2001, 6).
The character has been defined `as a mental image that the reader constructs from various
indications in the narrative discourse, which lead to a smaller or larger number of character traits`
(Bottez, 158). Readers construct a mental image of character, which is partly determined by codes
that are specific to the text and at the same time, is informed by their knowledge of the world and
conditioned by their social, cultural and historical position (Fokkema 1991, 51).
There have been more classifications and traits of characters depending on different approaches and
literary trends.
Starting from the assumption that human actions are directed towards an aim, there have been
established some classes of actors or actants who follow an aim and aspire to achieve it along the
storyline. These classes of actors are: Subject, Object, Power, Receiver, Helper, Opponent. The
most important class of actors is that which follows the aim and whose relation to the action can be
similar to the subject in the sentence (Bottez, 50).
The object is not always a person; it may represent the aim or the destination of the action. The
subject cannot fulfill its aim easily as there are certain factors that allow or prevent it from reaching
its aim. In psychological novels a character feature of the subject represents the positive or the
negative power used either for or against carrying out the goal (Bottez, 51).
Realistic causality highly contributed to establishing the old universal model for the structural
correspondence between people`s experiences and what characters do and experience in fictional

23
stories. Thus when confronted with an absurd, unreal fabula/story, readers were supposed to
continue to use their experience of the real world as the model by which they worked out the
meaning of the text (Bottez, 42-43).
In her book A Study in Characterization in British and American Postmodern Fiction, Fokkema
sets up an analytical model of the character, based on the theory of semiotics, thus trying to
establish the conventions of characterization in postmodern literature. In her view, character is a
sign, consisting of codes and conventions. She identifies two different codes: a code of common
sense and a code of metaphor or metonymy (Fokkema 1991, 51). As a sign, character has a dual
nature, given by different structural semiotic and narratological theories. Thus they can be divided
into actants/actors, signified/signified (Fokkema 1991, 30). She starts her analyses with defining the
`lifelike quality of characters` which lies at the core of the traditional realist concepts of the
character and functions as an evaluative criterion (Fokkema 1991, 21). The natural style of the
realist novel, which encourages the reader to take the language for granted and believe in the
author`s judgements, stands for the ideal conditions for creating the mimetic character (Fokkema
1991, 22).
Henry James also draws attention to the natural or artificial nature of characters in his classification
consisting of characters of `the essence` and characters of `the form`. For him the characters of
essence are the agents of the action, while those of form hold the narrative together without adding
something new (Bottez, 157). The characters of essence carry the value of representation, are
natural in the sense that they are described in images from nature. On the other hand, flat characters,
representing the ones of form, are artificial and may be only functional. In this sense, Henry James
claimed that his characters are based on life and just like human beings, they even seem to have a
life of their own. From the reader`s point of view, characters seem to acquire a degree of autonomy
because they can be easily taken out from the discourse and with the help of them the novels are
easily remembered (Fokkema 1991, 20). As a result, the quality of representation depends on the
suggestion that the character has an inner life. They are considered successful only if they are
natural and possess psychological depth. There is a difference between them and the artificial ones
that lack inner life and are less representational (Fokkema 1991, 25).
As the realist text relies on mimesis, the realist character thinks, behaves according to these codes
that are to be found in the cultural practices of the society that has produced the fictional work in
which they function. Thus the character is conceived on the basis of experience in which self-

24
knowledge, self-discovery and self-realization are the main features. The character is built on a
conception of self as a unitary and stable ego and the narrative usually depicts the events that
challenge and test this unity and stability from a moral point of view (Bottez, 179).
As modernism drew the writer`s attention from external reality, from a study of man in society to
his inner life, the self is depicted more profoundly in tight relation with the theories regarding the
human psyche in the works of William James, Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung.
Selves and identities of characters have been a main preoccupation of modernist texts ,but in the
postmodernist text the representation of self becomes problematic (Bottez, 158)
While a realist text concentrates on self knowledge and self discovery, the modernist text rather
`probes` the nature of identity, the limits between self and other. Self or identities of characters are
central to the modernist text and the representation of the self is not put into question (Fokkema
1991, 58).
In their fictional works Joyce and Woolf analyze the nature of the character`s identity, the different
emotional reactions in the confrontation between self and other as well as the archetypal patterns of
human life. It is in the modernist period that the character begins to have contradictory
psychological features, an idea put forth by D.H. Lawrence in his rejection of the realist, traditional
type of character. Truth becomes relative at the beginning of the twentieth century. Hence the realist
character is closed as it has to act only in accordance to some codes, conventions whereas the
modernist one is open. These contradictions in the psychological construction of the character made
the critics refer to Lawrence`s characters as allotropic (Bottez, 179).
Along with the belief in the autonomous individual in the postmodern consumer society, the
perspective upon the text and character changes. Postmodern texts do not encourage readers to
expand their consciousness, but they are more concerned with the politics of language and culture.
If mimesis was central in the traditional view of the character, the opposite happens in the case of
the postmodernist character. Structuralists claim that character is just a narrative function and
should not be confused with human beings. (Fokkema1991, 30) As a result the postmodernist
character is perceived as fluid and indeterminate.
In the older mimetic tradition, which regards literature as an imitation of life, characters were
treated as people, while in sructuralist theories they are dissolved in the text. If we extend these two
different views in the narrative space seen as a text and story, a character represents the intersection

25
of verbal patterns whereas in the story they are abstract constructions of the reader`s and author`s
image of people (Bottez, 49).
Regarding the mimetic concepts of characters, Aleid Fokkema claims that it is possible to establish
differences and similarities between fictional and real people. On the one hand a character can be
considered as closed the moment a novel is finished and from this point of view we can have a
coherent image of the character; on the other hand, the human beings are open in the postmodernist
text. (Fokkema 1991, 30)
`Poststructuralist critics find the concept of character outdated and consider that the postmodern
novel demonstrates that there are only subject positions, that the human being is like a grammatical
subject constituted in language (Derrida), the symbolic order (Lacan) or discourse (Foucault) and
they denounce the representational character of realist fiction as a convention (Bottez, 180).
The self is no longer unified or coherent. As a result the character is seen as fragmentary, dispersed
and disintegrated (Fokkema 1991, 62).
Characters in postmodern literature display multiple selves, and the text in which they appear offer
the reader the opportunity to escape his/her rigid self .This attempt to give up fixed self structure
was the sign of an attack on bourgeois society (Fokkema 1991, 63).
In postmodern texts the mimetic conventions are undermined, they foreground the false claims of
representation by using a strategy called `surface`, which means what remains after the mimetic
conventions are undermined (Fokkema 1991, 60). The mechanistic and determinist features of the
nineteenth century influenced the predictable behaviour of the character. The twentieth century
brings some notable changes in psychology such as the vague, analyzing character and his
subconsciousness as well as analyzing inner life. Modernism was less concentrated on character
construction and madness, chaos and disorder are common features in the twentieth literature. There
are so many elements that the reader does not know which way to go. There is a tendency to negate
the old order. The omniscient writer who was above all the minds and used to guide us, the readers,
is contested now. Both the reader and the character are left alone as there are many minds even
though the author`s mind created the book.
By reading a book, in which there are more different points of view, the reader is forced to change
the old theories of the unified self for a new belief in the fragmented self. Characters which were
considered once liberal and now liberated, are still seen as autonomous agents (Fokkema 1991, 63).

26
In the realistic novels of the mid-nineteenth century they are essentially free. As long as their `self`
is largely independent of their situation, the circumstances in which they find themselves can be
transcended (Bertens 2001, 7).
The two periods are quite different in approaching the nature of the self: while in the realist texts
the stable self is related to a moral problem in the text, the modernist text focuses on the self in
order to explore the complexities without foregrounding the difficulties of representing it. This is to
become the task of postmodernism (Fokkema 1991, 58).
`In the classic realist tradition the human personality was regarded as a unique combination of traits
that was made from a repertory of general human features. There was social consensus as to what
traits were deemed qualities and virtues and which were considered flaws and vices` (Bottez, 160).
Realism suggests that its characters find the reason for their actions and decisions inside
themselves. In general, realism is the representation of experience. The conventions of character in
the realist novel are coherence and psychological motivation. This coherent character acts according
to psychological motives; he appears to be independent from the textual costraints and embodies the
liberal ideology of the human being. (Fokkema 1991, 57)
A hero is said to have some established positive features such as courage, bravery, integrity,
physical and moral strength, which will eventually help him to overcome any weakness. The
opposite of the hero is passive, ineffectual and negative.
In Enlightenment `the hero of knowledge works towards a good ethico-political end- universal
peace`. Characters and their worlds function by cause and effect, by regular and fixed rules that are
familiar to them. He, the character, can became a voice of his times and society that can be checked
with contemporary sources (Fokkema 1991, 57).
Heredity is very important in the creation of a character in order to determine him in his actions.
This type of character is common in Dickens` novels. When the characters are determined by the
environment they come closer to the contemporary age. They behave, think and function according
to the codes of the culture the text belongs to.
In many realistic novels the class structure is decisive for the subject`s achievement of its aim or
failure to reach it (Bottez, 51).
The modernist texts focus more on the inner life of the character, they reveal the compexities of the
self as well as the incoherences of a psychological essence.

27
The human consciousness becomes the main object of literary analysis and the character as a
unified self is challenged.
What is important is that these complexities do not result in a disintegration of the character. In
modernist narratives the emphasis on the character`s subjectivity replaces realistic motivation with
that of associative memory. Modernist fiction rejected the traditional novel`s concern with social,
external reality and directed its attention to the human psyche, on man`s inner reality. (Bottez, 117)
Modernists use free flow of thoughts as a device to create the illusion in the reader of accessibility
to the character`s mind. This is practically the narrator`s intention to let the reader share the
character`s point of view. The traditional novels convey the character`s inner thoughts through
direct thought.
With postmodernist fiction, the realist representation is foregrounded while conventions of
characterization are still being challenged: instead, texts provide us with characters whose
psychological depth is replaced with discourses, with multiple selves and unstable identities
(Fokkema 1991, 63).
Bertens explains that the liberal humanist view of the individual which characterizes the modern
society is relatively similar to the one in the nineteenth century and influences the contemporary
literature (Bertens 2001, 7).
Traditional novels were about human beings whose psychological motivations sustained the plot
(Fokkema 1991,15).
With the rise of postmodern literature, conventional representation has come under pressure. As we
have noticed postmodernism was characterized by the `ontological dominant` in which fiction
problematizes the ontology of the literary text, or by its use of metafiction, a fictional writing which
draws attention on its status in order to question the relation between fiction and reality.
The conception of the character has changed and they are to be analyzed against the norms
established by previous literary trends.
In 1950s and 1960s literature produces the anti-hero of different kinds. The most extreme ones
seem to be the characters created by the dramatist Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot.
`Character` is often seen as a redundant term in postmodernism, as postmodern fiction appears to
subvert narrative conventions. Instead of characters, we have only discontinuous `voices`, or
`subjects` caught in language. As postmodern novels undermine representation, the characters are
frequently `flat`.

28
`Character in postmodern is a problematic concept. One is faced with the difficulty of dealing with
an element of fiction that has come under great pressure, as postmodern fiction appears to subvert
some of the most commonly accepted and widespread notions about character ` (Fokkema 1991,
14).
Postmodernist texts usually promote characters whose self is no longer coherent, but fragmentary,
plural and decentred (Bottez, 158).
In postmodernist writing `the narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great
dangers, its great voyages, its great goal` (Lyotard, xxiv). It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative
language elements- narrative but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive and so on. For instance,
with Proust the hero is no longer a character but the inner consciousness of time and put in question
because of the narrative voice. (Lyotard, 80)
Yet Fokkema argues that postmodern characters are not just artificial constructs in language that are
dissociated from human experience. Rather, new conventions of mimesis are established that are
appropriate to contemporary culture. Postmodernist novels display a dazzling variety of different
types of character. She distinguishes three main positions with regard to the linguistic nature of
postmodern character. Firstly, character is considered just an accidental function of discourses
whose aim is to maintain their social power. Thus, the idea is that the autonomous, free agent has
disappeared and there is no self to choose social identities, but the various discourses are those
which are imposed on the subject. (Fokkema 1991, 64) In order to sustain this idea, the use of
brand names are given as an example of the techniques of foregrounding the discourse of
consumerism that Pynchon inserts in his works in order to replace the human subject.
Other types of postmodernist characters are those which lack essence or psychological motivation
and appear in those postmodernist texts that question traditional representation. These characters
comment on the nature of language, being obsessed with the failure of it (Fokkema 1991, 65).
There are characters which retain a minimal personal essence which is represented in interaction
with the environment. In this case the postmodernist text proves to hold the idea that fiction is not
totally replaced by discourse.
In a fictional world the space is a construct just as the characters and objects from it.
In realist and modernist writing the space is organized around the subject, the character. Spatial
oppositions can relate to the character by the moral, psychological or ideological oppositions they
can create (Bottez, 57). With Dickens, for instance, space is seen as an immediate environment of a

29
character which functions as a symbol of certain traits. The relation between space and character is
also very strong in the naturalistic novel, where the influence of the environment on the subject is
highly emphasized (Bottez,190-191).
In Western culture an empty space is a place that must be filled and it may be interpreted as a
challenge (Bottez, 188). Space can influence a character`s mood by his/her spatial position.
Although both modernist and postmodernist literature explore the external reality to examine the
inner states of consciousness of the characters in postmodernist writing the space cannot be
organized in this way as it is less constructed (McHalle, 45). In modernist or postmodernist
narratives which introduce the reader abruptly into the action, he can have vague idea about the
location. The reader is used to decoding, imagine the events the narrative depicts (Bottez, 56).
Borrowed characters abound in postmodernism as a device of foregrounding the intertextual space.
This technique implies transmigration of characters from one fictional universe and integrating
them into another. There are also cases in which the same characters appear in different texts by the
same author (McHalle, 57).
This is mentioned as a transworld identity or `retour de personage` met in the works of Balzac and
Flaubert, consisting of the recurrence of the fictional character in another text by the same author,
which gives the illusion of corroborating the character`s real existence (McHalle, 204).
The transworld identity can occur between a real world person and a fictional character or as we
have seen, between fictional characters in two different texts.
This idea of the autonomy of the character has also been pointed out by Aleid Fokkema claiming
that characters could not only represent human beings but, the moment when they are created they
seem to be autonomous and perceived rather like a friend than a textual function. As a result,
attempts at defining the nature of character in fiction do not rely so much on its textual function but
on the relationship between characters and human beings (Fokkema 1991, 20). Thus, characters
appear to have a virtual autonomous life, independent of the text, reader or even author. A
character, although an abstract entity in a text, can be used as a label for a type of non-fictional
being. For example, we often hear people say he is a Hamlet or she is an Ophelia (Bottez, 49).
From this point of view, postmodernism does not present a radical break with earlier conventions of
characterization.

30
The postmodernist character and his world are so fragmented that they `flicker out of existence`. An
example of character which totally lacks coherence is V. in Pynchon`s novel as she is never
presented to have feelings, thoughts or dreams.
Characters in postmodernist narrative fictions can became aware of their own fictionality. There are
degrees of awareness. These characters wear the `metaleptic function`, which disturbs the
ontological level, very much exploited in the twentieth century drama, for instance in Pirandello`s
Six Characters in Search of an Author, Brecht, Becket (McHalle, 121). Some of the characters hear
their master`s voice; they are victims of romantic irony as their awareness ends up in humiliation
and resentment of their death. In Becket`s `Waiting for Godot` this is transposed in a metaphor:
being a puppet of a playwright means being the puppet of fate, history, the human condition
(McHalle, 123).
Irony overwhelmes plot, character, style and readers. Irony ensures the high quality of the text; it
supports detachment of the author who complicates without getting involved or not directly
involved.
`The producer of the text (at least from the reader`s point of view) is never, strictly speaking, a real
or even an implied one, but is rather one inferred by the reader from her/his positioning as
enunciating entity` (Hutcheon 1988, 81).

1.2 Postmodernist Characters in Search of an Author

In any reading experience there is an implied dialogue among author, narrator, the characters and
the reader. Each of them can position in relation to the others, from identification to the highest
distance (Bottez, 93).
In the twentieth century literature the omniscient author is disregarded. Instead of the omniscient
writer we have to deal with different points of view, plurality of opinions as each character sees
something different. The reader has to adapt to the movement of the writer. He/she can give us the
characters and we build up the novel. The reader`s role is to decode; he is active, being the author`s
confessor. At the same time he is shocked and intrigued.
`When in fantastic fabulas or the absurd texts of much postmodernists the logic of reality is denied
or distorted and the realistic story line is deconstructed critics agree that readers consciously or
unconsciously look for a logical line, which they may even introduce into the text` (Bottez, 43).

31
`In emphasizing the receiver`s role, postmodern works never suppress the process of production.
The concept of the artist as unique and originating source of final and authoritative meaning may be
dead` (Hutcheon 1988, 77).
Using mainly direct dialogue exchanges or free indirect style, modernist authors were striving to
remove their presence from the surface of the text. They try to hide their subjectivity by using the
first person narrative or the interior monologue/stream of consciousness. (eg. James Joyce in
Ulysses, Virginia Woolf in The Waves).
The role of the producer of the text is being rethought, after having been rejected by modernists in
their reaction against nineteenth century intentionalism. We are no longer to believe in the author as
a person but the producer would be known as a position to be filled within the text (Hutcheon 1988,
81).
Postmodernism has brought the author back to the surface. The author functions at two levels; the
vehicle of autobiographical fact within the projected fictional world and the producer of that world
(McHalle, 202).
By definition, the author occupies an ontological level, superior to that of his/her characters. To
sustain a relation with a character means to bridge the gap between ontological levels. For instance,
the person `you` is a sign of relation. On the other hand modernists turn their back to the reader.
They eliminate `you`. Sometimes the second person is used instead of the first person the moment a
character is `talking to himself`.
The postmodernist `you` represents an invitation to the reader to project himself/herself into the gap
opened in the discourse by the presence of you (McHalle, 224).
Romantic irony seems to have returned in postmodernism together with the writer`s obsession for
asserting his authority. It is like going back into the past to the traditional eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries in which the omniscient author has God-like attributes. He has access to characters`
feelings and innermost thoughts and places himself where characters are supposed to be alone. The
postmodernist author attributes himself the powers that gods have always claimed. For example,
Kurt Vonnegut is playing God with his fictional world, manipulating his characters and events like
a puppet-master (McHalle, 210).
The same superior and elevated position is held by postmodernist narrators like David Lodge in
Nice Work or modernist ones like D.H.Lawrence in Women in Love.

32
Displacement is favoured by the postmodernist author who is identified by his/her repeated attempt
at leaving one space and moving into another. There is a constant feeling of rootlessness. The
postmodernist author oscillates between authorial presence and absence. `Fully aware that the
author has been declared dead, the postmodernist text insists on authorial presence although not
consistently. The author flickers out of existence at different levels of the ontological structure
(McHalle, 202). He is discreet and avoids sounding personal. Contemporary notions of the death of
the author actually preserve the author in a displaced form (McHalle, 201).
What postmodernism does is to bring the author back to the surface. The author likes to believe that
he is in close contact with his readers. One of the techniques used is revealing the author`s position
within the ontological structure by `frame breaking`, introducing the author into the fiction
(McHalle, 198). Frame breaking is used in the novel The French Lieutenant`s Woman in chapter 13
to introduce the author`s voice in order to declare the text`s fictionality:
`This story I am telling is all my imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my
own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters` mind and inner thoughts , it
because I am writing in ( just as I assumed some of the vocabulary and `voice` of ) a convention
universally accepted at the time of my story, that the novelist stands next to God ….The novelist is
still a god, since he creates. What has changed is that we are no longer gods of the Victorian image,
omniscient and decreeing, but of the new theological image, with freedom our first principle, not
authority` (Fowles 1998, 95).
It is a commentary that emphasizes the status of the text as fiction referring also to God like power
of the traditional narrator. He also denounces realism as a convention.
This is also done to parody the role of the producer as the author enters his world in the person
whose physical features caricature those of the real Fowles.
Irony overwhelms plot, characters, style and readers. It supports detachment of the author who
complicates without getting involved or not directly involved.
The metafictional frame breaking is used twice: at the level of the fictional world and at the level of
author (McHalle, 198).
`The postmodernist author is free to confront us with the image of himself / herself in the act of
producing the text` (McHalle, 199).

33
What is interesting about the postmodernist author is that even when he appears to know that he is
just a function in the text, he chooses to behave like a subject, a presence. The author enters the
fictional world and confronts his characters in his role of author.
For example, the author may share the a train compartment with his characters without addressing
them in the fifteenth chapter in Fowles`s The French Lieutenant`s Woman.
Or in Vonnegut`s Breakfast of Champions the fictional character Kilgore Trout begins to suspect
that the stranger in the dark glasses who is present in the same cocktail lounge is in fact his author.
`As soon as the author writes himself into the text, he fictionalizes himself` (McHalle, 215). The
author has a strong imagination, behind which he takes shelter. He hides what the reader finds out
in the end.
On the other hand, there is the external narrator who never refers to himself as a character, as a
result he will not appear in the story. An external narrator may temporally use a character which has
a limited range of observation as a focalizer. The external narrator who chooses to view the events
through the mind of a character can only know the character`s perceptions and their effect limited to
his own experience. It is the case of Stephen Dedalus in Joyce`s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man. (Bottez, 87-88)
In the eighteenth and nineteenth century novels the external omniscient narrator- focaliser in novels
of Dickens or Eliot can show approval or dissatisfaction with some characters` behaviour in an
emotional involvement which is not specific to the twentieth century omniscient writer (Bottez, 89).
Thus focalization can be an aspect attached both to the narrator and character.
`It is possible to argue that this position of discursive authority still lives on because it is encoded
into the enunciative act itself` (Hutcheon 1988, 81). Thus postmodernism proposes interactive
powers in the production of the text.

34
CHAPTER II: THE POSTMODERNIST CHARACTER IN THE WORKS OF JOHN

FOWLES AND DAVID LODGE

2.1 Analysis of Postmodernist Character in The French Lieutenant`s Woman and Nice Work

British fiction changed its perspective upon the state of the literary narrative the moment John
Fowles invited the readers to discover the modern novel within The French Lieutenant`s Woman, in
an age of textual self-consciousness (Wells, 1).
When The French Lieutenant`s Woman appeared in 1969 it received very good reviews, being
considered a revival of the historical novel in England especially because of numerous attempts to
render the Victorian period. But as soon as we notice that the games played with the frame breaks
in the novel, it is more obvious that the real aim of the author is to build the illusion of writing a
Victorian novel out of time and then to destroy it.( D`Haen and Bertens 1993, 23)
The novel represented a shift in the course of British fiction in the 1960s with its conscious
imitation of a Victorian novel and by the use of an unconventional twentieth century metafictional
narrative, bringing the British novel in line with the international developments (Wells, 23).
Linda Hutcheon describes this novel as contradictory because it is both a very popular text and
subjected to academic study.
`Novels like these work both to address and to subvert that fragmentation through their pluralizing
recourse to the discourses of history, sociology, theology, political science, economics, philosophy,
semiotics, literature, literary criticism and so on.`(Hutcheon 1988, 21).
The novel`s protagonist is Sarah Wooddruff the `Woman` of the title, also known unkindly as
`Tragedy` and by the unfortunate nickname `The French Lieutenant`s Whore`. She lives in the
coastal town of Lyme Regis, as a disgraced woman, supposedly abandoned by a French naval
officer named Varguennes who is married and with whom she had supposedly had an affair and
who had returned to France. She spends her time at the Cobb, staring at the sea. She is seen there by
Charles Smithson and his fiancées, Ernestina Freeman, the shallow-minded daughter of a wealthy
tradesman. Ernestina tells Charles something of Sarah`s story and he develops a strong curiosity
about her. Eventually he and she begin to meet in secret, during which time Sarah tells Charles her
story and asks for his support, mostly emotional. Despite trying to stay objective, Charles
eventually sends Sarah to Exeter, where he cannot avoid visiting her during a journey.

35
He visits her alone and, after they have made love he realizes that she had been, contrary to the
rumors, a virgin. At the same time he is confronted with bad news about his prospective inheritance
from an elderly uncle, learning that he might not come into it as his uncle has become engaged to a
young woman.
From here, the novelist offers three possible endings. In the first one Charles marries Ernestina but
their marriage is unhappy. We are not let to know what happens to Sarah. Charles tells Ernestina
about an encounter which he implies is with `the French Lieutenant`s whore` but avoids telling
details and the matter is ended.
Before the second and third endings, the narrator- who the novelist wants the reader to believe is
John Fowles himself - appears as a minor character sharing a railway compartment with Charles.
He flips a coin to determine the order of introducing the other two possible endings, pointing out
their equal plausibility.
In the second scenario Charles and Sarah become involved in a relationship; he ends his
engagement to Ernestina with unpleasant consequences. He is disgraced, his uncle marries and has
an heir. Sarah flees to London without telling Charles, who searches for her, eventually finding her
in the company of several artists, enjoying an artistic, creative life. Then he learns he is the father of
Sarah`s child. As a family, their future implies a possible reunion.
In the third ending the narrator re-appears, standing outside the house where the second ending
happened. He turns back his pocket watch by fifteen minutes before leaving in his carriage. Events
occur the same way as in the second scenario but, when Charles finds Sarah again in London, their
encounter is not a happy one. They might not be parents in this ending as Sarah does not tell
Charles about a child. She does not express any interest in continuing their relation either. While he
leaves the house after having decided to return to America he sees the carriage in which the narrator
was supposed to be traveling. There appears a question: is Sarah a manipulating, lying woman,
exploiting Charles`s true feelings to get what she wants?
In the end the author complains about the difficulties of controlling the characters and he also
analyses the different customs in the nineteenth century, theories of Charles Darwin, the poetry of
Mathew Arnolds, Alfred, Lord Tennyson and the literature of Thomas Hardy. He questions the role
of the author, speaking of how characters disobey his orders. The characters have discrete lives of
their own in the novel. Philosophically, Existentialism is mentioned several times during the story
and particularly at the end after the two possible endings.

36
Of the three possible endings, the third is the most unlikely to be in accordance with conventional
reader`s expectations. The second ending promises to be closer to the taste of both narrator and
narrates since Sarah has been held out as the object of both Charles`s and their interest. Although
the third ending denies any trace of romance and is not within a traditional framework, it is
paradoxically considered the most satisfying of the three because the narrator creates it as the only
reasonable alternative in comparison with the other two ( Wells, 40).
Fowles avoids closure in order to question the authority of narrative, its ability to transmit meaning.
It is also an ironic perspective and a paradox of Fowles`s work in which the author is constantly
threatened by his own freedom and wishes to give up and impose his power. This is viewed from
the moral perspective of liberal humanism, as the betrayal of individual freedom. (Cooper, 3)
By offering different endings, the reader is given the interpretative freedom and rejects the
conventional pleasure of closure. The postmodernist reader is supposed to be an ambitious, open-
minded and curious one, and above all, to have an active role in the process of reading (Lenz, 25).
As we have already noticed, postmodernist writers return to history, but not in a nostalgic way;
there is a tension between the past and the present that is solved through an ironical dialogue with
the past and parody.
In The French Lieutenant`s Woman the Victorian values and conventions are contested and this
rejection represents an important source that Fowles uses in order to depict and contrast the
characters` features and the way they evolve throughout the novel.
For instance, the relationship between Charles and Ernestina reveal aspects of the Victorian society
which is ruled and motivated by financial interests. Charles is not far from replacing his own
feelings of love for Ernestina with a practical attitude to his future financial position.
`Charles quite liked pretty girls and he was not averse to leading them, and their ambitious parents,
on. Thus he had gained a reputation for aloofness and coldness, a not unmerited reward for the neat
way- by the time he was thirty he was as good as a polecat at the business- he would sniff the bait
and turn his tail on the hidden teeth of the matrimonial traps that endangered his path`. (Fowles,
1998, 17)
On the other hand, Sarah represents the voice of the author`s modern ideas, contesting the values of
the Victorian society. She disturbs that system of rules, struggling for her own independence as a
woman. Her features do not fit the rigid and conventional portrait of the Victorian woman. The

37
relation between Charles and Sarah is transformed into a tension deriving from Charles`s lack of
understanding Sarah`s principles of freedom.
What the narrator does is to exploit the pleasure of narrative suspense through the interest invested
in the story of Charles and Sarah until every variable is disclosed.
For readers, pleasure comes from the tension maintained through mystery and increasing accessible
vision and it is intensified along with the difficulty in obtaining either the full picture possessed by
Fowles or the picture which possessed by one of the characters to whom readers are encouraged to
identify. (Lenz, 35)
The postmodernist novel exhibits its interest in play and games. In The French Lieutenant`s Woman
the nature of games and play involves the active participation of the reader. The moment the reader
is offered three possible endings, he/she is actively involved in this game of fiction. The
postmodernist novel suggests that being mysterious is a way to become free.
Sarah`s whole life becomes a game that she performs in order to prove her existential freedom. Her
image of a whore is in fact a role that she plays to prove her existential freedom. This existential
freedom is depicted in contrast to Victorian norms.
It has been noticed that John Fowles has an interest in playing with power until the end of his
fictions, being ambiguous and fascinated at the same time by the efforts of individuals to control
and influence each other. In his fiction characters seem to struggle for power, supremacy not only
over the others, but over self and circumstances. (Cooper, 1)
Fowles`s female characters are symbols of modern times and voices of progression, independence,
creativity and authenticity. They have the power to shape the other characters` vision and change
the readers` expectations through their unconventional way (Lenz, 7).
These strong, self confident, independent characters are given the power by their creator to fight the
outdated principles and rules of their age. In The French Lieutenant`s Woman, Sarah fights against
the conventional sexual attitudes of a time that tend to put a label on her especially through the
scientific wisdom of Doctor Grogan viewed as a representative of the public opinion.
There are violent images that are used to characterize Sarah through the character`s point of view.
For instance, Mrs. Talbot images her falling off a cliff, this gloomy image culminating in Dr.
Grogan`s medical book, with cases of female brutality. From the narrator`s perspective these
examples expose Victorian principles in opposition with Sarah`s non- conformist behaviour.
(Cooper, 137)

38
Throughout the novel
Unlike other characters` presentation, Sarah is presented from the outside as a story told again and
again by the town people and from different perspectives. She is described as a solitary black
figure, allowing interpretation, with a cryptic but open face. When Charles meets her for the second
time, after the episode of Ernestina`s reading the poem, Charles associates her face first with his
sexual experiences, and then with a foreign text which he had read.
Sarah is given mythic status in the novel from the start. In Chapter 1 the narrator describes her as a
myth figure and later she is associated with Eve. In the study The Fictions of John Fowles:
Power,Ccreativity, Feminniity, Pamela Cooper mentions that the impression of modern woman that
Sarah makes upon readers is compromised by `an even more pervasive apprehension of her as a
timeless archetype of femininity` as Charles expresses this in Freudian terms when he identifies her
with his dead sister and with his mother lost in his childhood. (Cooper, 130)
Brooke Lenz points out that the political and social ideas embodied in those women appeared from
clearly feminist values and idealization of women that bear and make use of their attributed power (
Lenz, 16).
The French Lieutenant`s Woman is about seduction and this is the role of the postmodernist text.
Sarah has necessary intelligence and the genius of a story teller to seduce other characters just as the
narrator`s persuasiveness comes from his skill in sizing up his audience and telling it what it wants
to hear. In this case the narrator disguises the similarities between Sarah and her object of
seduction, Charles, and the text`s narrative elements, the narrator and narrates. (Wells, 38)
The success of Sarah`s story is supported by Charles`s fascination with her unconventional
character as well as his willingness to let himself be deceived by her tales. Like Charles, the readers
are supposed to have high interpretive capacities and be endowed with the necessary knowledge of
the contemporary literary theoretical issues and extensive reading background so that they can share
the male character`s fascination. But they have the advantage of receiving direct clues about Sarah`s
duplicity from the narrator, becoming more aware of the novel`s overall workings. (Wells, 31)
The narrator`s interruptions and comments containing valuable information are meant to teach
readers how to interpret the narrative and exert control over the reading process (Wells, 37).
Such an example of complicity between narrator and readers is a dialogue between Charles and his
fiancée, Ernestina Freeman, who seems to depict the typical Victorian wife in real opposition with
Sarah`s contradictory character. Ernestina is trying to read to Charles a poem to fill the hours one

39
evening. The passage on which she insists is a cliché about a lady who suffered an accident and is
being attended by her lover. The poem is a conventional romance which fails to draw Charles`s
attention. It is so boring that the narrator cannot help commenting on it.
Charles complains that he understands everything about her, while it is not her case. Their
relationship is not based on love, but on mutual interest. He has a financial motivation while she
wants his social position and prestige. She represents the old, standard Victorian bride. Although
Ernestina has moments when she proves she can be ironic, she is fundamentally associated with the
conventional, predictable and boring image of Victorian woman. (Wells, 33)
`Ernestina had exactly the right face for her age; that is, small-chinned, oval, delicate as a violet.
You may see it still in the drawings of the great illustrators of the time- in Phiz`s work, in John
Leech`s. Her gray eyes and the paleness of her skin only enhanced the delicacy of the rest. At first
meetings she could cast down her eyes prettily, as if she might faint should any gentleman dare to
address her.`( Fowles 1998, 25)
On the other hand, Sarah knows exactly what sort of story will be interesting to Charles because she
anticipates and directs his desires and holds her listener`s attention. For example, the way Sarah
describes her love affair with Varguennes is not in line with traditional narrative patterns. Her
version is told in a modern way emphasizing the psychological aspects and motivations. Like Sarah,
the narrator knows what sort of story will draw the readers` interest, he supplies two unconventional
romances: the story of the French lieutenant and that of Sarah and Charles. (Wells, 35)
Even though there are opinions which contradict the this female image of an artist, Sarah has an
important influence in the novel changing her life through narrative the moment she informs
Charles at Exeter that he cannot marry her.
On the other hand, in the study The Fictions of John Fowles: Power, Creativity, Femininity, Pamela
Cooper deconstructs the considerations on Fowles`s feminist sympathies and argues that the male
heroes are attributed the creative power. Instead women are just object of the male surveillance, she
is represented and never does the representing, thus differing from the role she had been assigned in
the past.
Even though Sarah seems to stand in the centre for personal liberty and independence, she is
constructed in and by the text in terms of restricted power, as the novel develops two different
perspectives: the emblematic function of Sarah and the reader`s experience of her (Cooper, 119).

40
An example of Sarah`s apparent independence is clearly shown by her presence at a moment in
Rossetti`s house, engaging her image of iconographic feminine ideal represented in Pre-Raphaelite
paintings with the issues of the artist`s creative predecessors.
`But it was indeed only a seeming, a mere idle movement of the May wind. For Sarah has remained
in the studio, staring down at the garden below, at a child and a young woman, the child`s mother
perhaps, who sit on the grass engaged in making a daisy chain. There are tears in her eyes? She is
too far away for me to tell; no more now, since the windowpanes catch the luminosity of the
summer sky, than a shadow behind a light.` (Fowles 1998, 466)
After having manipulated Charles, it is her turn now to be subjected to the narrator`s games, who
reduces her to the function of a text.
Identifying Sarah with the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of woman is also a way of defying the Victorian
stereotypes of woman (Cooper, 129-130).
This theory is also shared by Brooke Lenz in the work John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur, arguing
that there is the quest motif in Fowles`s work where the male hero is the real centre of attention
through his obsessive quest for the mysterious, inspirational female, while she appears as an
archetype, idealized symbol of femininity. Their role of muse along with their concerns, desires
make the heroines fade into the background of the male quest for enlightenment. (Lenz, 8)
The strategically complex presentation of Sarah within the enclosure of the Victorian novel makes
the readers perceive The French Lieutenant`s Woman as contradictory and ambiguous through
Fowles`s attempts to extend his searches into the nature and capacities of narrative, interrogating
both the aesthetic and moral role of fiction in the twentieth century. The novel`s metafictional
strategies are meant to emphasize the textuality of his characters, including Sarah and their role as
part of the fictionality of the text (Cooper, 114).
In the closing lines of chapter 12 the narrator describes his heroine as mysterious woman
questioning himself about the identity of his own character, but at the same time, by his immediate
answer at the beginning of chapter 13, he brings up the issue of self reflexivity of his own text. His
later comments on his narrative establishes the fact that both the story and characters including
Sarah are fictious, constructions of the author`s mind. Thus Sarah appears more or less directly as a
text or as a part of the text. (Cooper, 114)
`Who is Sarah? Out of what shadow does she come?

41
I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed
outside my own mind` (Fowles 1998, 94-95).
The narrative structures and strategies of The French Lieutenant`s Woman reveal the narrator`s
purposes to apply different postmodernist principles of interrogation and confront tradition.
Regarding Sarah, the novel compromises its commitment to the freedom of indeterminacy reducing
Sarah to the Victorian notions of fiction and emphasizing her lack of creative function. (Cooper,
136)
On the other hand, throughout the novel, Fowles claims he does not know the reality of the inner
lives of his characters, a fact which is clearly stated at the beginning of chapter 13 regarding the
impossibility of knowing Sarah.
The novel is selective as regards offering freedom, and ambivalent about feminine creativity and
authorship, its own relation to time, and the status of the narrative in an era of textual self-
reflexivity (Cooper, 140).
`In other words, to be free myself, I must give him, and Tina, and Sarah, even the abominable Mrs.
Poulteney, their freedoms as well. There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that
allows other freedoms to exist. And I must conform to that definition`. (Fowles 1998, 97)
As a novelist of manners, David Lodge deals with general literary types of educated middle or
lower-middle class characters going through the postwar period of change and uncertainty and
stress. Although the author places his characters in the academic world, his novels have proven to
be more accessible than the more rigorously programmatic academic fictions, being known as
campus novels. (Morace, xiv)
Lodge is an exceptionally amusing writer on academic life, able to focus on particularly
incongruous aspects of his themes to locate the most singularly excessive elements and then
exaggerate them on an absurd degree.
In Lodge`s world characters strive to position themselves in a society from which the rest of the
world is no longer excluded. In his trilogy, including Changing Places, Small World and Nice
Work, the characters are rather confused and unwilling for any improvement or change. The effort
to know more is definitely imposed. Lodge`s characters would rather stay in their daily routine
without being faced with surprises. Travelling is one of the topics used as reason for a change or
quest but it is seen as an ordeal by the characters as they think that the traveler cannot have their
own privacy. In case of the female protagonist in the novel Nice Work, Robyn Penrose, travelling

42
by car though Rummidge is an endless nightmare. What is weird about Lodge`s characters is that,
as soon as they are forced to set off on their journey of change, regardless of its real aim or
destination, they suddenly stop fighting, and seem to discover a new what if` attitude. They seem to
find a therapy anytime their intimacy is invaded. The name of one of his novels, Therapy, is not
given by mistake by David Lodge.
For example, Vic Wilcox`s therapy in Nice work is work. He hates Saturdays and days off.
Changing Places, subtitled A Tale of Two Campuses, grows out of Lodge`s later experience with
cultural exchange and contrast, coming as it did during the period of student rebellion on some
American campuses. Two forty year old stereotypical English professors, the repressed Philip
Swallow, from the University of Rummidge and Morris Zapp, from the State University of
Euphoria, an American University clearly modeled on Berkeley, exchange positions as well as
homes, cars, and eventually wives for six months.(Charney, 20)
What Lodges tries to do is to search out ways in order to satisfy the readers curiosity for the
meaningful ordering of experience. Just like in Nice Work, Lodge places his characters, many of
whom are also academics, in unfamiliar worlds and situations and their conflicts seem to be the
stuff of realist fiction.
While the purely academic matters and the usual culture shock elements are well developed
throughout the novel, Lodge`s concern is focused on the two men`s personal problems, sexual
exploits and conflicts, scholarly efforts and awakening as each approaches middle age. This
delightfully, playful depiction of academic life is carried over to another novel, Small World (1984),
subtitled An Academic Romance, also featuring Swallow and Zapp. Since Changing Places was an
academic novel, Small World is known as an academic romance because Lodges not only uses
characters from Changing Places, but he also adds many new ones. The novel, again with parallel
plots, moves from the English Midlands around the globe and ends in New York City, where the
annual Modern Language Association Convention, with its thousand of attendees, is characterized
by Lodge`s attention on some fourteen academics, publishers and writers. The central character is
Persse McGarrigle, a young Irish poet, who travels to a conference in Rummidge naively beliving
that he will be able to share in a lively discourse with others with similar expectations. Zapp sets
McGarrigle straight about the real academic world, as folklorist Sybil Maiden does, whose
discussions of the Grail legend with McGarrigle focus on the quest for fertility. McGarrigle

43
subsequently pursues graduate student Angelica Pabst from conference to conference in a sexual
quest, as does Marxist scholar Fulvia Morgana with Zapp and others for unconventional couplings.
The book, complicated with a variety of other eccentric characters is renowned for its memorable
satiric moments. It is surely one of Lodge`s most entertaining, funny works, which perfectly
captures the more absurd and obsessive elements of the academic world. (Charney, 20)
The book begins in April 1979 at a small academic conference at the University of Rummidge. It is
the first conference that Persse McGarrigle, the innocent young man who recently completed his
master`s thesis on T.S Eliot, has attented. He teaches at the fictious University College, Limerick,
after having been mistakenly interviewed because the administration sent the interview invitation to
him instead of someone else with the same last name. Several important characters are introduced:
Rummidge Professor Philip Swallow, American professor Morris Zapp, retired Cambridge
professor Sybil Maiden and the beautiful Angelica Pabst, with whom McGarrigle falls immediately
in love. The whole book is constructed around his quest to find her and win her heart. Angelica tells
Persse that she was adopted by an executive at KLM after she was found, abandoned in a washroom
of an airplane in flight. Persse professes his love for her, but she leaves the conference without
telling him where she has gone.
Morris Zapp and Philip Swallow, who are seeing each other for the first time in ten years, after the
events of Changing Places, have a long evening talk. Since the previous novel, Swallow has
become a professor and head of the English Department. Zapp has discovered deconstructionism
and reinvented himself academically.
The second part of the book focuses on the travel around the world, showing what different
characters are doing at the same time. Other characters are introduced, such as Cheryl Summerbee,
who is a check-in clerk at Heathrow airport and plays a small but very important role in helping the
other characters as they travel around the world.
Characters continue to move from one part of the world to another, from conference to conference,
as Persse is on a continuous chase of Angelica and never seems to catch up with her.
Part V of the novel takes place at the Modern Language Association where all caharacters are
present and when Arthur Kingfisher oversees a panel discussion about criticism where Swallow,
Zapp, Morgana and others present their opinions on what literary criticism is.
All of the narrative threads of the novel wrap up but for one: Persse realizes that Cheryl
Summerbee, not Angelica, is the woman for him, and he flies to Heathrow to see her. He arrives at

44
the airport on New Year`s Eve, but learns that Cheryl no longer works there, having been fired the
day before Persse arrives. The new attendant tells him that Cheryl wanted to travel anyway at some
point, and took this as her chance. No one knows where she has gone. The novel ends with Persse
wondering where in this narrow and small world he should start looking for her.
This comic novel transposes elements of the quest of the Holy Grail into the world of academic
conferences with ironic effect especially that the characters correspond to the heroes of romance in
their pursuing ladies, wandering around the world and having adventures just like the heroes of
romance. This return to the myth aims at mocking heroic element transposing it in the modern
academic environment.
In Nice Work characters are placed in situations that are not familiar to their own everyday
environment which makes them become more aware of their world and appreciate it.
Dr. Robyn Penrose is a lecturer in English literature at the University of Rummige, a nostalgic
portrait of Birmingham University itself. The usually male name Robyn, but here spelt with a `y`, is
relevant and not accidentally chosen by the author, it is a source of misunderstanding and ambiguity
as Dr. Penrose is a convinced feminist who is against the male dominance within the University, by
teachers and administrators.
The novel is set in 1986, in the middle of considerable unemployment in English industry. The year
was named by the government the year of industry in order to stress the idea of the importance of
developing industry, especially manufacturing and engineering, and to raise the status of industry in
a country which had always appreciated arts and professions, more than sciences. The irony, which
is the main tool that is used to describe British industry and other social domains, is felt even from
the beginning, in the title Nice Work (Nice work- if you can get it). The irony is double, as not only
the industry was being restructured at that time, but the same process was going on in British higher
education. Unfortunately, Robyn finds that she is not going to lecture as her three- year contract
will end. She is specialized in the industrial novel in the nineteenth century English
literature.(Barlow, 196)
The novel is set up in an opposition structure of two worlds, that of industry, represented by Vic
Wilcox, MD of Pringle`s engineering, and Academia, represented by Dr. Robyn Penrose. This
opposition implies both a geographical and a social dimension, expressed by the textual structure
promoting the apparent difference between the superiority of male, industry, economic, capital and
the inferior side of the female, university, cultural world. (Grenzebach, 3)

45
With Rummidge located in the Midlands, and Victorian Birmingham being known as the heart and
workshop of England form a good setting for a modern industrial novel exploring the clash of
cultures in the late twentieth century Britain.
In relation with the structuralist principles, space has the role of stabilizing and the main way of the
organization in a literarary text. In David lodge`s Nice Work the space opposition is fundamental in
understanding the novel.
The clash of the two worlds, that of industry and academia, representing contrasting ideologies,
values and concepts, cause misunderstandings and arguments between the two protagonists. At the
beginning space is the main element which clearly separates the two different worlds, by the
geographical map of the town Rummidge. (Grenzebach, 5)
Though a specialist in the industrial novel Robyn Penrose knows nothing about modern industry;
she had never been inside a factory. Brought up on the south coast, close to the Isle of Wight, her
life was related to school, university, research at Cambridge and temporary lectureship at
Rummidge.
Lodge`s novels are constructed on two different structure levels, the surface and the deep structure.
The first functions on the female intrusion of protagonist Robyn Penrose into the male space of
industry which causes disorder. This is the way of calling into question this opposition of the text in
terms of poststructuralism . Apart from the clash between the two worlds, there is another
dimension, represented by the discovery of the other and at the same time of the self in the process
of displacement, familiarization and overcoming prejudices. (Grenzebach, 3)
Not only the conflict between two different values and life principles represent the source of
humour and irony in the novel, but also the representation of family. Vic is unhappy with his family
life, being married with a fat, lamenting and boring wife, so that his life has become an endless
routine from which it is very hard to escape. With this background, Vic becomes a source of
humour and a victim the moment he meets Robyn and falls in love with her.
Nice Work is about contrasts and irony used to produce funny effects, for instance when Robyn and
Vic begin to change places or Robyn complaining about the bad circumstances of the arts under
Margaret Thatcher.
Victor Willcox is not very happy with this decision of having assigned to him a socialist as well a
feminist. This Industry Year seems to be a total failure since the beginning as Robyn causes

46
problems with her involvement in a strike of the workers after warning one of the Pakistan workers
that he is about to be sacked because he is no longer efficient at operating a particular machine.
The novel creates a world of the real world in order to introduce the opposition structure leading to
meaning through difference. Robyn is designed as an intruder into the different male- dominated
geographical and social field; the discovery of a different world and way of living leads to a critical
vision of male dominance, a change in the power balance of the roles in terms of poststructuralism.
(Grenzebach, 3)
To a certain extent, the novel can be read as a parody of a modern romance mainly through the use
of clichés and stereotypes. Being intertextual in nature, parody draws its source from comparing
itself with other texts. In the case of Nice work the strategies applied for this purpose are:
establishing parallels on the content level and incorporating hints on different textual levels
(author`s notes, comments of the intrusive narrator, dialogue), exposing the conventions of the
model text regarding the story as well as the narrative technique. On another level of parody which
leans to literary criticism, the contradictions of particular literary and philosophic concepts are
exposed while confronting these with the occasional behavior of the characters. The main rhetorical
device parody makes use of is irony, operating on a larger scale, where whole patterns and concepts
become subject to ironical treatment. (Sramkova, 3)
The characters use outdated phrases such as `Haven`t we met before? `with ironic intention, the
author stressing it when he lets Vic say this in a genuine puzzlement.
`Haven`t we met before?` he (Vic) said. `Not that I`m aware of `.`I`ve a feeling I`ve seen you
recently`. `I can`t imagine where that would be.`
`Wilcox continued to stare at her through a cloud of smoke. If it had been Everthorpe, she would
have dismissed this performance as a clumsy pass, but Wilcox seemed teased by some genuine
memory.`( Lodge, 110)
The main two characters represent clearly opposite trends. On one hand, Vic defends the traditional
Victorian values of industrial England, becoming hopelessly romantic; on the other hand Robyn
rejects ruthlessly the moral code of Victorian society by her behavior. The way Lodge chooses how
the two protagonists represent Victorianism and postmodernism is to be found in the comic
treatment of the characters. (Gutleben, 70-71)
An important factor in a romance is coincidence, which is smartly used in Nice Work to stress the
parody effect. For example, while Robyn and Vic spend their evening in a nightclub and a few

47
minutes later, Vic`s favourite song `Power of love` is played, Victor`s reaction sounds like a cliché:
`From now on it will be our song` and `Robyn can hardly believe her ears.` The narrator leaves the
readers imagine Robyn`s reaction on purpose.
`Don`t be silly`, she says, handling him the bottle. ` That song has gone to your head. The one about
the power of love`. `It`s my favourite song,`he says. `From now on it will be our song.`Robyn can
hardly believe her ears.`(Lodge, 290)
The different treatment of the two main characters is more evident in the changes of their behavior
along the novel.
In the main two episodes of the novel, Robyn`s confrontation with the reality of a factory and her
romantic relation with Vic, she reacts cowardly by running away and returning to her books. This
behaviour does not make her too popular in the readers` eyes. While she is trying to escape from the
social problems she was forced to witness, Vic turns out to take his responsibilities in both
professional and emotional matters (Gutleben, 72).
Vic becomes a target of fun the moment he falls in love with Robyn. The comic effect comes from
the discrepancy between his lover behavior and his supposed, usual one as a business manager.
Occasionally he sings sentimental songs and even dances. On the other hand, this change from
power to fragility makes Vic more human, more sympathetic in the reader`s eye.
In the case of Robyn the parody relies on stereotype and caricature due to her behavior in human
relations. She seems incapable of love, rigid while lecturing Vic on different theories about
semiotics or character (Gutleben, 72).
The female protagonist is a left-wing feminist, thoroughly versed in poststructuralism, who does not
believe in the concept of character. She is `a character who, rather awkwardly for me, doesn`t
believe in the concept of character`. (Lodge, 39)
In what is both an evocation and a parody of the latest critical developments, the narrator gives his
character`s reasons for dismissing the concept of character in literature: it is a bourgeois myth and
there is not really any `self`. The narrator decides to ignore Robyn`s views, as she has ordinary
feelings like everyone else. (Fokkema 1991, 13)
The use of abstract language played off against the ordinary language of the outraged practical Vic
creates a brilliant comic effect in one of their conversations in the car while driving to an
appointment. They see along the road a billboard advertising Silk Cut cigarettes. Whether the
advertisement is a photograph is not clear, but for the purposing of illustrating a vocabulary of

48
interpretation it makes no difference. Out of irritation with Victor, and perhaps out of professional
compulsion, Robyn analyses the ad. Victor feels that the philosophy of life is threatened by
Robyn`s analysis of the advert:
`It was in the first instance a kind of riddle. That is to say, in order to decode it, you had to know
that there was a brand of cigarettes called Silk Cut`. His impression is that she must have a twisted
mind and the conversation ends with Victor saying: `I can`t take any more of this. D`you mind if I
smoke? Just a plain, ordinary cigarette?`
This is not to say that her analysis is incorrect or foolish. Victor refuses her Freudian elaboration
and makes clear that the subliminal suggestions in the ad of beauty and sensual pleasure are sharply
separate from smoking a cigarette.
Nice Work explores identity and intimacy in terms of the difficulty of creating personal
relationships and questions the very possibility of love in an age of dubious moral values and
between characters who themselves seem weighed down with contradictory emotions.

2.2 Multiple identity

Causality is one of the main features in narrative structures, determining the perspective from which
the events are evaluated. Story development, which implies continuity, depends on purpose and
consequently to the preservation of an individual, a community, an institution, a faith or a culture.
On the other hand, if causality is lost this will lead to a loss of such values and identity (Calinescu,
Fokkema 1987, 43)
In this frame of causality and consistency are to be understood the workings of human mind. But
postmodern literature, as we have seen, denies this framework, specific to the realist novel.
The radical discontinuity has entered characterization as well, as postmodernist characterization
refuses the psychological causality and presents characters as unknowable, inconsistent or even
absent. In other words the self is non-existent (Bertens 1987, 140).
Postmodern character is just a constructed element, a subject inside the discourse and it cannot
preserve any of the qualities that have been traditionally attributed to character. Various definitions
and established concepts are given to postmodern characters, such as flat, round or failed, proving a
real departure from the unified, realist self. (Fokema 1991, 14)
In close relation with the liberal humanist values of the British tradition, such as the belief in the
individual creative imagination and ethical responsibility, Fowles is exploring current and

49
problematic issues regarding class and gender. In Fowles`s world creator figures can be both tyrants
and liberators, masters and slaves in a consistence ambivalence.
A major feature of the modern novel seems to be the sense of individual isolation, a state of
introspection and alienation which is common to the twentieth century consciousness. The
difference between fiction and reality is changed because the world is invaded with all sorts of
fictions such as mass consumption, advertising, instant translation of science and technology into
popular imagery, all these things leading to the increasing blurring of identities. We live inside an
enormous novel. For the writer, it becomes less and less necessary to create an imaginary world.
The fiction is already there. (Travers, 310)
Alienation can take different forms depending on the society and historical period. In the nineteenth
century Darwin`s theories regarding the human evolution and the idea of God bring changes in
people`s perception upon life (Bulman, 10).
John Fowles`s novel The French Lieutenant`s Woman explores both the nineteenth and the
twentieth alienation. We meet both male and female alienated characters that have no idea why they
feel that way.
There are different reasons for alienation, from religious, political, economic to sexual or familial.
The inability to control life and a sense of uselessness are normally associated with alienation.
Fowles`s work deals with issues of power in various ways and contexts, this being primarily seen in
his interest in individual and free choice and quest for identity (Cooper, 7)
The French Lieutenant`s Woman explores the concept of dual identity, which is itself a
contradiction, a paradox. The main characters suffer from identity crisis. They are in the process of
the exploration of self or of potential selves.
Charles, for example, is a liberal- minded scientist, but at the same time, a member of the high class
with interest in preservation of the social order.
Ernestina is a clever young woman, but constrained by inferior opportunities and social oppression.
Sarah finds herself, as a woman, in a position of exclusion from Victorian society. She struggles to
be fully herself against the limiting and conforming pressures, expectations of the society. Socially
and economically unable to be in Ernestina`s place, to be in the position that her society has
constructed for women, she is isolated. Her options are narrow: governess, servant or a prostitute.
She chooses the status of outcast, an attitude of freedom. In this way she starts begins to rewrite in
positive terms the story of her own identity as a woman. Her actions both acknowledge and deny

50
the power of the ideological forces of her society and that in part she is constructed as woman by
that society.
Sarah`s actions to rewrite her identity as a woman, her contradictory behaviour reject as well that
woman in general which is a closed and static category. Her dilemma at the end of the story is
whether she opts for a conventional marriage or remains a new, modern woman. The defense of her
integrity is defined as a form of her social and psychological independence.
Characters experience the difficulty of knowing her true identity, her actions giving rise to many
stories told by Dr. Grogan, Mrs. Poulteney, Charles, Ernestina.
She is introduced to the reader as more like `a figure from myth, than any proper fragment of the
pretty provincial day` (Fowles 1998, 11). The mythical world she is part of and her misleading
society about being a fallen woman deserving the label whore enable Sarah to stand outside
conventional Victorian society and gain a measure of freedom.
The author strategically connects Sarah`s image to the nature. The wildness of the Undercliff
matches Sarah`s natural wildness. The distinction between wildness and civilization has particular
importance for the character of Sarah. Her true nature only emerges from her long walks in the
nature and she assumes a mask of careful politeness when she is at home in the house of a
distinguished lady of the town.
` It was not a pretty face, by any period`s standard or taste. But it was an unforgettable face,
and a tragic face. Its sorrow welled out of it as purely, naturally and unstoppably as water
out of wood-land spring. There was no artifice there, no hypocrisy, no hysteria, no mask;
and above all, no sign of madness. The madness was in the empty sea, the empty horizon,
the lack of reason for such sorrow; as if the spring was natural in itself, but unnatural in
welling from a desert.` (Fowles 1998, 10)
Set in the Victorian middle class England The French Lieutenant`s Woman has a narrative line
which is supported by traditional coherence in plot and characterization. Many passages in The
French Lieutenant`s Woman insist that the characters are beyond the author`s control.
Although Fowles was interested in encouraging the use of interpretive freedom, the varied
interpretations, he seems to resist this multiplicity, being less radical than it was expected,
especially in his early works such as The Collector, The Magus and The French Lieutenant`s
Woman. This resistance is directly linked to authority. He uses narrative conventions so that the
author has the ultimate control while giving the illusion of interpretive freedom. Fowles`s work

51
fascinates the readers through the interrogation of the narrative illusions of coherence and control,
illusions of freedom, indeterminacy and multiplicity. Readers and characters never manage to
complete the search and observation they are involved in (Lenz, 38-39).
The footnotes and the constant modern narrator`s comments upon the Victorian story give a
unique authorial perspective to The French Lieutenant`s Woman .The novel is focused on the
mysterious Sarah, whose dubious reputation positions her as an outsider within, rejected by the
society and at the same time being at the center of its attention.
Despite his occasional omniscience, the narrator, as well as his characters, are unable to enter her
consciousness. What they can do is constantly watch her activities and try to explain them
according to their own standards.
There are different visions which are in competition: that of Charles, as a developing existentialist
and that of the modern narrator as a controlling influence (Lenz, 42).
David Lodge`s novels seem to be more accessible as there is the unwillingness to abandon realism.
Furthermore they are open- ended, the writer preferring to let the reader imagine possible scenarios.
Fiction has always offered the illusion of the unified, autonomous subject, but Robyn Penrose, the
protagonist in Nice Work, believes that the myth is now deconstructed by the modernist and
postmodernist novel. Selves are dissolved into the language and there is nothing outside the text.
She continues with the idea that there is not really any self, no finite, unique soul or essence that
constitutes a person `s identity but only a subject position in an infinite web of discourses.
`According to Robyn (or, more precisely, according to the writers who have influenced her thinking
on these matters) there is no such thing as the `self` on which capitalism and the classic novel are
founded- that is to say, a finite, unique soul or essence that constitutes a person`s identity; there is
only a subject position in an infinite web of discourses…`.(Lodge, 40)
This is the problematic status of the character in postmodern fiction. The postmodern novel
demonstrates that there are only fragile subject positions, that language is the only constituent of
self and that multiplicity of identity has replaced the unified, coherent and stable ego (Fokema
1991, 13).
The novels of David Lodge illustrate the process of renewal of self in the industrialization process
of an age which created fragmentation of society and alienation. They explore identity in terms of
the difficulty of creating and sustaining meaningful personal relationships focusing especially on
the relation between the individual and social constraints.

52
By placing his main characters in an unfamiliar environment to them, David Lodge makes the
heroes see their own world with better awareness. In Nice Work, Robyn is forced to change her life
related to the academic world with a male- dominated one the moment she is assigned to shadow
the local factory manager, Vic Wilcox.
The confrontation with a new surrounding opens for Robyn the possibility to reveal her full, even
contradictory personality. She sticks to her feminist beliefs, whereas for Vic the confrontation with
feminist criticism makes him tumble. The exaggeration of feminist attitudes has a parodic effect
when Robyn insists on being called a `woman` instead of a `girl` by Charles. The mocking of this
gender discourse begins already with Lodge`s choice of the androgynous name for his heroine,
which is a source of comic misunderstanding at the beginning of the Shadow Scheme (Sramkova,
8).
`The name of your shadow is Dr. Robyn Penrose` `A medic?` `No.` `Not a shrink, for Christ`s
sake?` `No, I understand he`s a lecturer in English literature`. `English what?` `I don`t know much
else about him- only got the message this afternoon`(Lodge, 89).
The way Lodge constructs the characters is ironic of the radical postmodernist vision. He practices
a moderate form of postmodernism.
The character of Robyn Penrose initiates the reorganization of power roles in the male environment
of industry. Robyn enters a new world to her as an academic without a prospect and ends with a
steady job and giving up her love based on interest. Victor, in contrast, does not stick to any of his
principles; instead he changes completely. He begins as a well-off, stable capitalist, who loses his
world and is rescued by Robyn as she decides to invest in his plan to find another future career
prospect. There is an increasing power of Robyn and the reversal of the balance power between
male and female.
Lodge`s novel shows how easily an apparently stabled world, ordered in a structuralist system of
opposition, the radical and the conservative, can be called into question.

2.3 The Use of Intertextuality

In The French Lieutenant`s Woman the Victorian period is not presented in a nostalgic way in
relation with the present. On the contrary, it is placed critically regarding issues on sexuality, social
inequality and responsibility, science, religion, art which aim at the values and principles of the
modern reader and at the social conventions of the twentieth century (Hutcheon, 1988, 46).

53
With contemporary writing the reader is asked to detect the presence of intertexts, especially those
which are deliberately used by an author in order to parody certain literary conventions. The
presence of the past, the mottoes and footnotes, is what Linda Hutcheon calls `the burden of the
past`, meaning that `the reader of Fowles`s The French Lieutenant`s Woman is never allowed to
ignore the lessons of the past about the past and the implications of those lessons for the historical
present` (Hutcheon 1988, 88)
The break with the historical chronology in The French Lieutenant`s Woman is seen as a break with
the old, traditional novel. The novel is revolutionary in its challenging textual strategies.
The presence of Victorian voices in the postmodern novel is mainly recognized by the extensive use
of quotations. The quotations and allusions to famous Victorian thinkers, poets, novelists such as
Darwin, Marx, Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough, Thomas Hardy, Lewis
Carroll, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx abound so that Fowles builds his own version of the nineteenth
century social and intellectual history.
Fowles comments on the Victorian morality and its literary conventions with the presentation of an
alternative world- the world of the twentieth century and alternative endings trying to show the
need for freedom and emancipation.
Sarah`s role in the novel is important in the sense that she is the character who demonstrates
Fowles`s ideas on freedom and fiction and, in a way, she functions as a model for the readers to
follow. With the fictional version of her life that she constructs, Sarah manages to alienate herself
from the society she lives in. Being seen as a fallen woman enables her to stand outside
conventional society. She is a social outcast. This is a parallel to what Fowles himself achieves
through his fiction: exploiting the conventions of Victorian realism, he stands outside the
conventional Victorian world, which is the fictional world he constructs.
Charles fundamentally accepts the Victorian views and his fascination with science and
paleontology provides a direct link to classification and categorization that characterized that era.
The obsession to classify, name and define all aspects of life is perhaps the driving force behind
Victorian science in general. Charles`s paleontological fondness is an example of the Victorian
fascination with and confidence in the ability of science to explain the strangeness of nature.
(Booker, 108)

54
The way John Fowles includes social criticism in his narrative with his historical presentation of the
Victorian period was something new and problematic, forcing the readers to meet and get used to
both the referential and non- referential nature of literature.
Fowles`s commitment to metafiction is explained in terms of power by Pamela Cooper in The
Fictions of John Fowles: Power, Creativity, Femininity. Fowles`s work is not only a matter of
morality, ethics or philosophy. The power of creativity stands for metafiction, as the work of art is
the vehicle of the artist`s power. In this sense, Fowles, the creative artist, looks at the text as an
artifact. Both the structures and the content of the text represent expressions of the artist`s power.
Although there are not direct references to postmodernist elements in his fiction, Fowles seems
preoccupied with historical, narratological, linguistic issues which put a pressure on the
contemporary writer and offer a clear proof of the authorial consciousness and challenges in the era
of postmodernism. (Cooper, 8)
The fact that Fowles inserted these historical and social facts in the footnotes as well as in the flow
of the narration created a generic effect and hybrid mixture which was considered innovating at that
time (Gutleben, 63-64). What John Fowles managed to do was a compromise that influenced many
British novels since the late 1960s, bringing realism and innovation together. Thus The French
Lieutenatnt`s Woman represents the cultural movement which produced it and helped the readers to
get used to this new type of fiction (Wells, 23-24).
These texts try to maintain a relationship with their readers and the world .These relations are
maintained in the literary context of realist and modernist influences (Wells, 8).
Both characters in the novel and readers are endowed by the narrator with interpretative skills, some
degree of awareness of contemporary literary theoretical issues as well as reading background.
Fowles parodies the Victorian norms and literature and attempts to break the reader`s conventional
moral and aesthetic expectations. He challenges moral assumptions by setting the nineteenth and
twentieth century against each other and destroys aesthetic assumptions with the three endings he
offers. Although he questions the realist conventions, he does not give up to them entirely. In the
background there is the Victorian world. He teaches his readers that reality is illusory and can be
altered because what he/she reads is fiction. The reader should realize that the text he/she reads is
self-reflexive, but at the same time centred on outward reality. The conventional reader expects
fiction to imitate the real life. This does not mean that the world of `reality` reflected in the fiction
is the exact copy of the real world.

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The epigraphs and footnotes give the impression of historical authenticity and create the illusion of
reality.
“But a still more important consideration is that the chief part of the organization of every
living creature is due to inheritance; and consequently, thought each being assuredly is well
fitted for is its place in nature, many structures have now no very close and direct relation to
present habits of life”. (Darwin, The origin of species; Fowles, 1998, 11)
Fowles breaks the development of the novel at key points when the narrator steps outside the frame
of the novel and reminds the reader that what he/she is reading is a fiction constructed according to
artificial conventions, not according to a reflection of `reality`.
British novelists of the 80s and 90s have been bringing back to life voices of the past and
particularly of the Victorian era. John Fowles`s novel brought to public attention the parody of
Victorian social, sexual and literary conventions, but the real coming back to Victorian tradition
was done by many British novelists in the 1980s and 1990s (such as A.S.Byatt in Possession or
Graham Swift in Ever After), for various reasons. (Gutleben, 5)
Fowles`s complex treatment of Victorian society and highly sophisticated parody of Victorian
fiction set the Victorian age in direct opposition to our modern one.
The presence of the Victorian fiction in David Lodge`s novel Nice Work is evident from the
presence of the quotations, epigraphs, the two opening ones as well as the epigraphs to the six
different chapters, which are taken from Victorian novels. This is a way of reinforcing the effect of
the importance of epigraphs as well as announcing the genre through which the novel is intended to
be identified, respectively the industrial novel. The explicit references to the Victorian industrial
novel and society are meant to explain that it is to be read as a modern counterpart of the nineteenth
century industrial fiction. (Gutleben, 67)
At first sight Nice Work can be regarded as a realistic piece of work containing a large number of
comic elements, but the quotations from the Victorian industrial novels serving as mottoes for each
of the six parts of the book prevent us from considering the assessement athough there can be
drawn parallels between the plot of Nice Work and the respective industrial novels Hard Times,
North and South etc. (Sramkova, 2)
Both female protagonists in The French Lieutenant`s Woman and Nice Work represent the voices of
the modern ideas of their times. Sarah manages to transcend the boundaries of Victorian male

56
dominance and society by assuming a mysteriousness and resistance to interpretation whereas
Robyn problematizes male world with her feelings of superiority, taking her own world for granted.
She is a postfeminist, post-structuralist academic specializing in Victorian novels and mostly
influenced by capitalism; she does not believe in the concept of character and thinks that characters
are `bourgeois myth, an illusion created to reinforce the ideology of capitalism`(Lodge, 39).
Besides the direct access to Victorian texts, there are numerous comments on the subject that the
main heroine makes referring to the nineteenth fiction as a specialist and a lecturer of the industrial
novel at the University of Rummidge. She even wrote a book called The Industrious Muse:
Narrativity and Contradiction in the Industrial Novel. These passages about the genre and its
context make up a metadiscourse, a text within a text which reflects a contemporary perspective on
the Victorian tradition (Gutleben, 68).
`Unable to contemplate a political solution to the social problems they described in their fiction, the
industrial novelists could only offer narrative solutions to the personal dilemmas of their characters.
And these narrative solutions are invariably negative or evasive` (Lodge, 82-83).
The use of parody has been outlined in the novel Nice Work resulting from the contradictions of
particular literary and philosophic concepts exposed while confronting them with the occasional
behavior of characters that represent them. The main rhetorical device parody makes use of is irony.
But irony is used not only verbally used. Being intertextual in its nature, parody is realized through
comparing itself with other texts, establishing parallels on the content level and introducing hints
into the text. In the case of the novel Nice Work, the strategies used in this sense are the presence of
the author`s comments and notes, dialogues so that whole patterns and concepts become subject to
ironical treatment.(Barbora, 3)
The two main characters, Robyn and Vic represent Victorianism and postmodernism differentiated
in their comic treatment. Vic, a defender of the traditional values of industrial England, becomes an
object of fun when he falls in love with Robyn. His behavior creates a comic contrast with his usual
serious image as a business manager. On the other hand the rigidity of Robyn`s behavior creates
comedy in her criticism of her Victorianism expressed on the tactics of Victorian fiction or when
she persists in lecturing on the difference between metonymy and metaphor. (Gutleben, 72)
Moreover, the way the narrator decides to introduce the two main protagonists in different manners.
The novel opens in the Victorian fashion by indicating the spatio-temporal setting and reveals Vic`s
private thoughts and habits. When Robyn is presented in the second chapter, the narrator seems to

57
replace the realistic codes and play with his own problems of narrative organization particularly in
relation to his deconstructionist heroine, `a character who, rather awkwardly for me, doesn`t believe
in the concept of character`(Lodge, 39).
The inversion of the moral code of Victorian society is noticed in Robyn`s case by the fact she
conforms to the stereotype feminist doxa.
Surprisingly, the end of Lodge`s novel returns to the Victorian prototype. When Robyn invests a
great part of her miraculous inheritance in Vic`s new enterprise, she endorses the capitalism she had
been so categorically condemning.

2.4 The relation narrator-character

The relation between narrator and character is bound up with the relationship between the narrator
and the world that is narrated.
First-person stories will often relate external descriptions in which the narrator presents a former
self, with current events in which the narrator participates and in which the narrator takes part in the
world that is narrated, therefore is internal.
The perspective where there is no place for the author suggests that, even if we are not aware of it, a
third-person narration must have a narrator and that narrator is always present in the story. The
narrator functions as a continuum of the world that is described rather than as a continuum of the
author. In the first person narrative the narrator is identical with a character while in a third-person
narrative the narrator is not identical with one of the characters or part of the world they narrate. (
Bertens 2001, 73-74)
On the other hand, Sarah is considered to be Fowles`s voice, expressing his own ideas on the
Victorian society. By questioning the Victorian values, she comments on them from Fowles`s
perspective.
Linda Hutcheon noticed the use of parody as a kind of game in The French Lieutenant`s Woman by
the metafictionally present modern narrator whose main purpose was to make the reader aware of
the Victorian society and aesthetic context. The stories of Charles and various narrators and fiction
makers (Fowles himself, the narrator, his persona, Charles and Sarah) meant to parody the
conventions of the nineteenth century novel, the authoritative narrating voices, the narrative
closure.( Hutcheon 1988, 45).

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In chapter 13, the narrator himself steps forward to comment his own work, explaining that the
story we have read is an imaginary one, the characters are also imaginary, they have never existed
before. He has pretended to know his characters because he has to follow some rules regarding his
Godlike position in the novel as long as he creates, but this has changed in the sense that he is no
longer the God in the Victorian time. Freedom, the influence of existentialism,is now the rule he
follows.
The narrator does not believe in the God like power and omniscience of his Victorian predecessors
giving up authorial control in favour of his readers` and characters` freedom in terms of action and
interpretation (Wells, 37).
Fowles uses both innovative literary devices and traditional elements such as coherent character
development and omniscient point of view; Regarding his narrator`s intrusions, the author aims at
integrating his novel in the contemporary literary trends at that time, giving the impression of
interpretive freedom ( Wells, 38).
In a constant desire to acquire information through direct observation both characters and readers
are bound to a visual practice controlled by authorial manipulation. This suggests a kind of
authorial pleasure in having ultimate control over information in the text and thus compromises, in
a way, his attempts to encourage interpretive freedom. (Lenz, 38).
In terms of perspective, Brooke Lenz notices a fascination for the visual into Fowles`s fiction,
making both readers and characters watch in a unique way. For instance, characters watch
attentively the other characters` actions as they try to understand the mysterious motivations of the
other characters, especially women.
If the narrator has given way to the perspective of one of the characters- even if that perspective is
still described for us by the narrator- the narration takes place through a focalizer. Focalization
allows us to draw distinctions between various types of narrative.
On the other hand readers have to watch the action from a particular perspective, through the lens of
the narrator but mainly through the eye of the main character. More than being a way to depict a
certain situation, this technique can be a means by which readers identify with a particular character
(Lenz, 35).
By means of the narrator who enters his own fiction in order to comment upon the process of story-
telling itself, Fowles explores ways in which authorial omnipresence might be rejected (Cooper,
104).

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In Allegories of Telling: Self Referential Narrative in Contemporary British Fiction, Lynn Wells
mentions the fact that, although the delay in revealing information is one of the ways used to
control and keep the readers and characters interested in the plot of the novel and it is accessible for
both the narrator and the characters, there are two kinds of authority. The narrative authority implies
a gradual decrease of power as the narrator reveals the details of the plot that readers want to know.
The moment he breaks the flow of the events to discuss on the subject of the art of writing fiction
and on the textual freedom, Fowles`s narrator considerably diminishes his narrative authority, the
omniscient power for the sake of increasing his narratorial authority. The multiple endings are an
example of the narrator`s greater interest in experimenting new, freer and more self- reflexive
narrative techniques. These metanarrational discourses together with the the control of information
to the end of the novel represent two types of authority that Fowles uses. (Wells, 39-40)
Although Fowles`s awareness of the new, modern novel is clearly noticed in his experiencing the
potential escape of characters from their writer`s authority, the ambivalence regarding power is
expressed in his authorial and narratorial refusal to enable Sarah with independent identity (Cooper,
2).
Through Sarah, with the clear encoding of her as a fiction, the moral and aesthetic commitment of
the novel to freedom is perceived as partial and contradictory (Cooper, 128).
The ambiguity regarding the freedom of Fowles`s characters also comes from the author`s direct
comments upon his own work. Although characters are considered to be only in the author`s
imagination, they seem to be given the freedom to choose their own way according to their rules.
What makes us recognize postmodernist elements in the narrative techniques that Fowles uses are
the blurred boundaries between the narrative levels within which the narrator and the characters
move pointing out to a perception of reality as a construction similar to that of fiction.
Linda Hutcheon has also pointed out the idea that postmodern fiction has often explored the issues
of freedom and responsibility in terms of characters as Fowles does in The French Lieutenant`s
Woman (Hutcheon 1988, 223).
The autonomy of Sarah led to the idea that she has an active role in the relation writer- character, an
agency which precedes and is the inspiration for Fowles`s naming and representation of her, being
responsible for the production of the novel in which she features. She is the muse, the fallen
woman. Sarah can seduce both author and characters. (Fletcher, 96)

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Just as Sarah proves to be a good story teller by her own intelligence used in her desire to maintain
Charles`s interest in her, the narrator uses his persuasive skills in relation with the audience. Thus
we notice a certain degree of familiarity with his narrates, coming from shared erudition and
experience. Through many explicit intertextual references in his narration, he is confident in his
narrates` level of literary knowledge; in this sense he often refers to the twentieth century in a
confidential manner when the characters seem to be ignorant. This proves the way in which Fowels
construct his relationship both with the readers and his characters putting them in a position of
superiority and downsizing his authority. (Wells, 38)
Both Sarah and the narrator know how to use narrative techniques in order to draw the characters`
and readers` attention and both storytellers succeed in managing the information. For example,
Sarah continues to maintain Charles` interest because it is always changing and she is in control of
it until the end. On the other hand, the narrator has the ultimate authority over what will happen to
the characters, regardless of their independence (Wells, 39)
John Fowles has the opportunity to explain what inspired him to write the novel in the introduction
of his essay Notes on an Unfinished Novel, telling that the novel started as a visual image with a
woman who `stands at the end of a deserted quay and stares out to the sea. That was all.`(Fowles
1977, 137)
The image first appeared to him one morning when he was still asleep and persisted in his thoughts
for a long time, inspiring him to write the novel.
`The woman had no face, no particular degree of sexuality. But she was Victorian, and since
I always saw her in the same static long shot, with her back turned, she represented a
reproach on the Victorian age. An outcast. I didn`t know her crime, but I wished to protect
her. That is, I began to fall in love with her. Or with her stance. I don`t know which`.
(Fowles 1977, 136)
Many of the postmodern novels like to question the subjectivity that involve sexual identity and the
representation of women (Hutcheon 1988, 160).
Fowles`s confession is to be regarded as a gift, as readers are permitted to have access to the
author`s thoughts and implicitly to the meaning of the novel. In addition to this, Fowles`s notes
reveal more than a moment of inspiration; it is a kind of love story between author and character
(Fletcher, 95).

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The postmodern age is considered a time of crisis for the novelist, who suddenly finds himself
standing in a place where novelistic tradition seems to split into two different directions: that of
Vonnegut`s fabulation and that which seems less novelistic in techniques as well as in effect.
Instead of following a certain path, contemporary writers build their own course of action and
hesitation through the novel. The result would be the problematic novel whose writer can keep loyal
both to reality and fiction. The problematic novel is a way of maintaining the realist tradition as a
literary anachronism.
(Morace, 15)
The main feature of the contemporary fiction seems to be its self-consciousness, which frequently
evidences itself in the form of parody. By this, the author prefers to keep the distance from the
common language and from reality it presents.
In Nice Work, David Lodge`s rewriting of the nineteenth century industrial novel, the female
protagonist is, writes the narrator, `a character who, rather awkwardly for me, doesn`t believe in the
concept of character` (Lodge, 39).
Being taken as a parody of the latest critical developments, the narrator gives his character`s reason
for disregarding the concept of character in literature: it is a myth, a constructed one, it is an
outdated subject. The protagonist`s arguments against the notion of character are immediately
ignored by the narrator, who considers that she is like everyone else and decides to treat her like a
simple character. (Fokkema 1991, 13)
In revealing the main character`s ideas this is done with a considerable parodic effect, the narrator
drawing the reader`s attention to the fact that these ideas are not in fact Robyn`s own, that she took
them from famous authorities in this field:
`She forced her mind through the labyrinthine sentences of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida until
her eyes were bloodshot and her head ached` (Lodge, 46).
The omniscient narrator seems to be very well accustomed to the postmodernist theories but he
prefers to keep a certain distance while sharing these ideas through irony.
The narrator behaves differently in relation with the two main protagonists of the novel.
For instance, when dealing with the male character Vic Willcox in chapter 1, the narrator is
impersonal, just informing the reader about Vic and what he is doing at the moment. But he
changes his attitude as well the narrative style when he has to treat his heroine, concentrating on her
in accordance with the conventions of the Victorian novel. His own comments on Robyn, especially

62
in the first part of chapter 2, are separated from the narrative itself by brackets in a confidential
tone. These comments describe her teaching habits and her philosophic views in an ironical way by
the narrator`s taking distance from them. (Sramkova, 9)
The parodic strategy consists of the difference between Robyn`s theories on postmodernist
deconstruction and the way she sometimes behaves, which is pointed out by the narrator himself:
`(…) but in practice this semiotic materialism does not seem to affect her behavior very
noticeably- she seems to have ordinary feelings, ambitions, desires, to suffer anxieties,
frustrations, fears, like anyone else in this imperfect world, and to have a natural inclination
to make it a better place`. (Lodge, 40)
David Lodge has demonstrated a keen interest in recent critical theories. This interest over the
nature of both fiction and criticism have found their way in the novel, which have remained rooted,
self-consciously in the realist tradition.
The dialogue between the narrator and the reader is designed to give the illusion that the reader is
presented a frame of reality, believing that he or she is the witness of a true story. Using the person
`we` the reader is invited take part indirectly in the scenes, having a privileged position beside the
narrator. In his effort to persuade the reader about the accuracy of the facts, the narrator can relate
the events of the story to the extratextual reality. After using the person `we` implying both the
narrator and the narrate, the narrator reveals himself, stepping forward and offering his guidance to
us: `rather awkwardly for me`, `I will tell you`.
`And there , for the time being, let us leave Vic Wilcox, while we travel back an hour or two in
time, a few miles in space, to meet a very different character. A character who, rather awkwardly
for me, doesn`t herself believe in the concept of character.`(Lodge, 39)
`And who is Charles? While Robyn is getting up, and getting ready for the day, thinking mostly
about the nineteenth-century industrial novels on which she has to lecture, I will tell you about
Charles, and other salient lasts of her biography. (Lodge, 41)
Having offered his guidance, the narrator withdraws behind the story and stays in the background
for the rest of the story so that the reader has the impression that the narrator`s identity is only a
mockery at the Victorian narrative.

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 CONCLUSIONS

As we have already seen, postmodernism is commonly regarded as undermining or questioning

notions of progress, unitary subject, meaning, truth, reality or representation. The emphasis on
fragmentation, multiplicity and pluralism, the focus on surface rather than depth represent important
aspects connected to postmodernist fiction that have been discussed and illustrated in the analysis of
John Fowles`s The French Lieutenant`s Woman and David Lodge`s Nice Work.
The postmodernist novel, as we have seen, often undermines the conventions of narrative continuity
or the traditional ordering of discourses.
Fowles and Lodge break with the rules of narrative tradition, undermining the narrative by adopting
characteristics of the postmodernist literary movement such as discontinuity, critical discussion of
the form of narration, intertextuality, self-reflexive images, parody, play and games. The narrative
techniques of the ironic voice, the multiplicity of perspectives, the freedom and openness of texts,
the use of history are used by both writers to fulfill certain purposes in their fiction. They use these
postmodernist techniques in order to subvert and problematize the novel form, the distinction
between fiction and reality and to pose a series of questions regarding the freedom of the individual,
the process of narrativizing history and historicizing history. The strategies of narration, the
relationships among the author, narrator and the reader in relation to the text, represent the central
issues throughout their novels.
In view of their awareness of the problematic relation of literature and reality, their works are
highly self-conscious and reflect on the novel`s process of becoming. These novels are concerned
with showing the reader his illusions in order to prepare him/her for the possibilities of coming
closer to reality.
In the realist text, the discourses are arranged in a linear disposition. Fowles`s and Lodge`s works
undermine the linear movement of the texts by the constant intrusion of the modern narrators or by
alternative endings. In The French Lieutenant`s Woman the three different endings convey
Fowles`s belief that man`s future is not predetermined, but is largely influenced by his choices.
Since postmodernist fiction refuses narrative ordering and refuses to offer solutions to its questions,
it opens itself to different interpretations. The discrepancies within the perspectives of the
characters give rise to the missing links that the reader must supply by him/herself. The
postmodernist text reinforces the active role of the reader in this process of suspending the meaning

64
within the territory of the author only, and positioning the reader as a consumer of such meaning.
The reader is no longer a consumer of meaning, or what the author offers or intends in the text, but
rather a producer of different meanings.
The French Lieutenant`s Woman embodies this promotion of different voices, of pluralism that
undermines any authoritative single discourse, emphasizing the fact that individuals are able to
rewrite their own histories without any influence from outside authorities. The author has been
displaced as he is no longer the source of information and explanation of the text.
The postmodernist novel exhibits its interest in play and games. In The French Lieutenant`s Woman
play belongs to the existential notion of reality as a game of being.
Parody is a representative feature of postmodernist fiction and both Lodge and Fowles use it in their
novels. Through the narrators` voices and comments on the Victorian age, on plot or characters,
they address the readers, appeal for their sympathies and play with their expectations. They invite
the readers to identify with the main characters in their novels. The moral impact moral impact of
narratorial comments directed against widely accepted norms is undercut by the extensive use of
parody. The narrators, for instance ,parody the heroic style used in many Victorian novels. The
major form of narrative used by Fowles and Lodge is the ironic voice, which is in relation to the
concept of the author and the manipulation of character.
Postmodernist fiction shifts its centre from the deep level of character, typical of the psychological
realism and modernism, to the level beyond individual personality, a complex integrity of mental
and spiritual orientations of literary character, of author and of reader. In comparison with the
realistic `round` character and the modernistic interiorized one, the postmodernist character seems
depersonalized. Postmodernist writers do not deny the complexity of human reality. What is new in
postmodernist fiction and implicitly in the novels of John Fowles and David Lodge is the principle
of approaching this reality, the ways we read character and text. The essence of their artistic
strategy is to install a new subject by subverting traditional psychological representations.
The main characters acquire a new dimension, becoming both a playful and serious strategy of the
writers. The old conventional concept of unitary character no longer fits the fiction and the concept
of the hero undergoes some changes. Any certain identity is undermined and blurred. Instead, a
complexity of mental and spiritual orientation is created. By the narrator`s claiming in The French
Lieutenant`s Woman that he does not know the reality of the inner lives of his characters, he allows
the reader to choose between the outer and the inner lives of the characters an expression of the

65
existential experience that Fowles adheres to throughout the novel. Having known the reality of the
characters more than the narrator, the reader becomes the producer of meanings in the narrative.
As postmodernist writers, Fowles and Lodge find new ways to introduce human matters. These
ways are based neither on the technique of psychological descriptions, introduced by the realists,
nor on stream of consciousness explored by modernists, it is created by the authenticity of
conversations, human situations. The reader is being made aware of his free will in designing not
only the lives of the protagonists, but also his own life. Yet view of the possibility of freedom does
not seem very convincing. Fowles`s The French Lieutenant`s Woman and David Lodge`s Nice
Work show that there are choices but do not show how the best possible choice could be met. This
is the paradox, the dilemma of postmodernism: the more freedom of choice, the less free the
individual is.

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PART II: TEACHING POSTMODERNIST CHARACTER

CHAPTER III: WHY TEACH LITERATURE?

In recent times, there has been pointed out the fact that the study of English for specific practical
purposes and the emphasis on the spoken more than on the written language, has severely
challenged the importance of literature in schools as a second or foreign language (Carter, Long
1991, 1).
In order to support the necessity of promoting and maintaining high standards of teaching
literature, there have been given three main reasons, which are generally accepted by teachers as
main reasons for teaching literature and related to specific teaching practices: cultural studies,
literary formalist studies and personal enrichment approach and language development.
The cultural model is considered necessary as it is a way of acquiring knowledge and about the
cultural context that produced the literary works. Through the literary text, the reader has the
opportunity to know the most significant thoughts and feelings of human beings. Teaching literature
from this perspective will make the students aware of the universal value and will be able to
appreciate different cultures and ideologies from various historical periods and areas. (Carter, Long
1991, 2)
The teacher should be ready for dealing with certain problems that might appear while interpreting
a text with the students from the cultural perspective because they might want a monolithic
understanding of a text which may be reinforced by a rather authoritarian notion of the teacher`s
role. In this situation it is up to the individual teacher what role they want, or are able, to play.
Another possible problem would be that students may simply lack the confidence to reach
interpretations on their own, possibly because their previous learning experience has relied little on
the taking of personal responsibility. In this situation, it is important not to throw students in at the
deep end by immediately demanding personal interpretations from them. It is advisable to gradually
introduce tasks and activities which encourage students to become more self-reliant in producing
their interpretations.
From a strictly teaching perspective, the cultural model is considered more teacher-oriented, in
which the knowledge transfer prevails and the text is in the centre of the process of acquiring
information. Although the emphasis on the individual works is not very high, it is usually a way by
which literature is studied (Carter, Long 1991, 8).

67
In this age of information, students should be enabled to practice interpretation, analysis,
argumentation and empathy. They must be guided to develop the necessary skills and intellectual
abilities to make their own way in a world that invades them with messages, information and very
often, misinformation. (Irvine, 4)
As we make sense of a text according to our cultural background, it is natural that when using
literary texts students will interpret them in terms of their own cultural background. If we expect
them to do otherwise, we will need to supply them with relevant cultural information. The cultural
approach can be extended by examining the history and characteristics of literary movements, the
social, political and historical background to a text. Knowledge about literature means not only
learning information about literary contexts, authors, literary terms but it can be better expressed in
terms of pleasure and enjoyment. This kind of knowledge is more likely to involve student-centred
activities which aim at a high level of personal response and involvement.
The study of literary texts can involve the student`s willing to store information about the history of
the target literary texts, tradition and conventions, relationships between authors, texts and contexts
which make up that literary culture (Carter, Long 1991, 3-4).
To some extent literary and language competence are related because an appropriate level of
proficiency is required before reading a text and it implies a recognition of language structure.
Language development is another reason for teaching literature, as it is a way of teaching specific
vocabulary or structure. Literature represents a source of linguistic opportunities to the language
teacher and allow many valuable exercises of language learning possible and aimed at stimulating
great interest and involvement. On the other hand, this should not result in failing to motivate
students to read the text by using mechanistic teaching practices which can substitute language
activities. The main purpose of this approach is to put students in touch with varied creative uses of
language with literary texts (Carter, Long 1991, 8).
It uses language-based approaches in order to draw attention to the way language is used and the
relations between linguistic forms and literary interpretations. This language approach is less
concentrated on the literary text as a product and it involves more the process of reading. This
means that the teacher becomes an enabler, working with students and creatively ensuring a
relevant and meaningful experience through a direct contact with the language of the text. (Carter,
Long 1991, 7)

68
Literature can represent a valuable resource of contexts in which individual lexical or syntactical
elements are made more memorable .Reading a substantial body of referential texts, students have
the opportunity to become more familiar with the characteristics of the written language, the
various possible structures and the different ways of connecting ideas, fact which leads to the
enrichment or improvement of their own writing skills.
The extensive reading required in understanding a novel or a long play can develop and improve the
student`s ability to make connections from linguistic structures and to deduce meaning from
context, both being considered useful instruments in extending the reading process (Collie, Slater,
5).
Being trained to read and think deeply for long periods of time, students can learn how to learn in
ways which are relevant to the real complex world beyond the books.
Learning how to read and learning to make connections is not the end of the reading process, not
when it comes to reading novels in the classroom. Reading in teams, sharing the experience of
reading with other students in the classroom is considered a collective enterprise and it involves
participation in shared attempts at analysis and construction (Irvine, 4).
Literature helps extend the intermediate or advanced learner`s awareness of the structure of the
language. As literary language is not met in every day communication, at a productive level
students will become more creative because they begin to appreciate the richness and variety of
language (Collie, Slater, 5).
A literary text can be of great help for communication. The language-based, student-centred
activities have the role of involving the students with the text, to develop their perceptions of it and
help them express their reactions to it. The activities should be organized according to each type of
text and the aim must be involving as many students as possible in the world created by the text.
A student who works with the literary text can improve his basic skills of language learning. There
might be expected results upon the whole language learning process as long as the reader is well
motivated and as long as reading literature is maintained interesting. In this case, the choice of a
particular literary text is very important because it can facilitate this creative relationship which the
reader establishes with the text. The criteria of selecting the suitable texts depend on each particular
group of students, their interests, needs, cultural background and language level. Language
difficulty should represent a serious task for the teacher because access to information or
interpretation might be an obstacle if students do not have a basic level of comprehension. For this

69
reason it is advisable to select for teaching those literary texts which are not far beyond the
students` reading comprehension. It is also very important to know which particular work is able to
motivate and draw students` interest and producing positing reactions. Those books which are
relevant to the life experiences, feelings or dreams of the learner should be taken into consideration
by the teacher. It is important that the teacher select material which can highly motivate the process
of reading a particular text. Such motivation may be sustained not only by classic literary texts but
choosing any text which grows interest to read between the lines (Carter, Long 1991, 6).
If it is meaningful and enjoyable, reading can have a long-term and beneficial effect upon the
learners` linguistic and cultural knowledge (Collie, Slater, 6).
For example, for the language learner, stylistics has the advantage of illustrating how particular
linguistic forms function to convey specific messages. It not only helps students to use their existing
knowledge of the language itself, but stylistic analysis can also provide a way of comparing
different types of texts in order to see how they fulfill different social functions. For example,
students may be asked to compare the description of a character in a novel with the information
about someone given in a letter of reference. The students will then be able to examine how these
texts differ and the reason for this difference. The teaching of literature can thus be integrated more
into the classroom, since literary texts can be studied alongside other kinds of texts.
Literature can also be of great help in the language learning process because of the personal
involvement it can produce in its readers. From this point of view, teachers should select language
teaching materials which focus on how a language operates both as a rule-based system and as a
socio-semantic system. The process of learning is essentially analytic. Getting involved in the
process of reading literature will enable students to shift the focus of their attention beyond the
more mechanical aspects of the foreign language system. For example, when exploring a novel,
play or short story for a sustained period of time, the reader will become accustomed with the text
and eager to find out what happens next, he or she will feel more involved and will feel closer and
closer to certain characters, sharing their emotional experiences (Collie, Slater, 5)
The personal enrichment approach is used in order to make the students get involved in reading the
literary texts and this is achieved successfully if the students carry with them beyond the classroom
the pleasure and curiosity of reading and continue to engage with literature throughout their lives. It
is also an efficient tool in order to help students grow as individuals as well as their relations with
people and institutions around them (Carter, Long 1991, 3).

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The personal growth model is more student oriented, as the teacher `s main purpose is to motivate
the students to read and understand the topics depicted in the literary texts in relation with their own
personal experience.
From the methodological point of view, the personal growth model is closer to the language-based
approach as the interpretation of the texts is realized by examining them in relation with the
contexts in which they were produced without diminishing the importance of historical and cultural
traditions (Carter, Long 1991, 9).
The teacher`s task is to share with students their own enjoyment of reading and, in doing so, to
encourage them to develop as enthusiastic, skillful and critical readers of texts of all kinds. For
students who are to explore a new are of a new literary work, the first encounter with it may be
crucial. First impressions can influence their feelings about the whole enterprise they find
themselves engaged in. They are likely to feel the experience with curiosity and excitement. The
teacher`s role must be to raise the sense of adventure while providing a supportive atmosphere.
(Collie, Slater, 16)
A teacher may encounter situations when not all students are unwilling to respond and react by
expressing their own opinions in the classroom because of their different education context or social
factors which may inhibit them from expressing themselves.
Students should be able to identify with the experiences, thoughts and situations which are
described in the text. They need to be able to discover the pleasure and enjoyment from making the
text their own and interpreting it in relation to their own knowledge of themselves and the world
around them. A reader who is involved in a text which is relevant to his life experience is likely to
retain more information and gain more from exposure to the language of the literary text.
Because students have both a linguistic and a cultural gap to bridge, foreign students may not be
able to identify with or enjoy a text which is perceived by them difficult. In this case, interest and
relevance are very important as well as enjoyment, the pleasure of meeting one`s own thoughts or
situations in a literary text. All of these advantages can lead learners to overcome the linguistic
obstacles. (Collie, Slater, 7)
The teacher has the responsibility to help students learn to enjoy reading, learn to identify with the
subject. Literature deals with challenging ideas as well with enjoyable experiences. A difficult part
that the teacher faces is to help accept that it is all right to be confused in a post- structuralist era
when so much discussion on literature concentrates more on its existence as part of a cultural

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process. Any interpretation of the text is likely to be partial than definitive, and we should
encourage students to approach literature in this spirit. From this point of view, students should be
encouraged to consider a novel in the context of its adaptation.
Processes of textual analysis-interpretation-evaluation and communication are fundamental to
students` interest in studying literature.
Awareness of language variety can be an important prerequisite for responding sensitively to
literary language use. Writers will often exploit the capacities of the language to express shifts in
social context, role relationships, attitude to subject matter, emotional association. Students can
derive heightened sensitivity to literary texts if they are given opportunities for textual analysis,
comparison and student-centred project-type investigation of literariness in language. (Brumfit,
Carter, 1986, 38)
The teacher should design activities that can serve to promote defined language skills, as well as to
develop a competence to recognize and respond to the literariness of a literary text. Linguistic
models, such as those developed for narrative analysis, should be more widely used in literature
teaching, since they can serve as enabling devices for appreciation and integrated study of narrative
shaping for literary effects and language use in narrative organization. (Brumfit, Carter, 1986, 40)
Literature allows the development of techniques of finding meaning from context. The language of
literature, adapted for group and interaction activities, overcomes and encourages the learner to test
the dimensions of words. It creates a feeling for language.

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CHAPTER IV: JOHN FOWLES AND DAVID LODGE IN CLASS

There are two important elements that a teacher should bear in mind when introducing and teaching
the novel: the content or the world which the author has created, a space including people, things,
events, to which students and readers generally respond to as they do in the real world. From this
perspective, characters in a novel are to be treated as if they were beings enabled to choose their
own course of actions.
The second important aspect is to consider the novel a text, a work of art, and treat it in a detached
and analytical way. In this case, characters are to be seen like some tools or devices that the author
uses in order to manipulate and create a particular effect, their own existence unfolding within the
pages of the novel. In this way we are more likely aware of the real role of the character in the
construction of the plot.
A good start for a teacher would be anticipating student problems while studying a novel:
understanding the plot, the language, how the type of the narrator who tells the story can shape or
influence the way the story is told.
When teaching these aspects of the novel, the teacher should make sure that the students have a
clear understanding of the plot and central ideas or how the novel is structured especially those texts
where the chronological narrative is not clear or straightforward.
Other aspects that the students have to deal with while studying a novel are related to narrative
viewpoint, characters, the setting, background, language and style.
The first imperative would be to try and draw the learners quickly into the text, so that they find it
interesting and want to continue reading it on their own. It is worth spending some time with the
reading, trying at the same time to pre-teach possible lexical difficulties. When the students get to
the text itself, much of the vocabulary will have become familiar. The teacher also has to explore
the main themes with the students, in order to elicit students`own thoughts and feelings on the issue.
When they turn to the text later, the preceding activity will be familiar in new surroundings. A
warm-up can be designed to set the mood, create interest and curiosity. Sometimes it leads students
not to the beginning of the book but to the first significant or dramatic passage. (Collie, Slater , 16)
Some examples of activities meant to raise students` interest are: using the title and cover design, in
order to speculate about the book, its story and mood ; using the theme to elicit students` feelings

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and opinions about the atmosphere in the book; biographical montage, in which background
knowledge is given (Collie, Slater, 23).
When approaching the text students should be aware of the different shapes or types of novel, from
short ones with a few characters and fairly simple plots, to the large and complex ones, with
numerous characters, plots and subplots and many different strands which may or not be
interconnected. For a better understanding of a postmodernist text, the students should know that
there are different genres of novels: fictional biography or autobiography, where the focus is on the
life and development of one character; the picaresque novel, which follows a central character on a
journey through life and faces a series of adventures; the social novels that use the characters and
the world they inhabit as a way of criticizing or protesting about social or political issues.
There are situations in which students are unwilling to respond in the classroom and the reasons are
different. Perhaps their traditional way of education or culture prevent them from discussing their
own opinions; some of them may also be individually sensitive to particular issues raised in a text.
Whatever the reasons, tasks and materials for exploiting literary text should be designed with the
likely behavior of students in mind. Some of the ways of encouraging students to respond are
asking them to free-associate or brainstorm around the central theme or title of a text before they
read it; providing them with a questionnaire about some of the issues or situations raised in the text
and ask them to discuss their own experiences of the situation before reading. In the case of
analyzing the character in a text they can be asked to imagine that they are certain characters in the
text and what they would do in the situation of the characters in the text.
It is also vital to ensure that students have adequately understood the language of the text, and the
teacher has provided the necessary historical, literary or cultural background for them to be able to
make sense of the text.
In the case of a postmodernist text, the teacher can dwell on use of intertextuality, the mottoes or
notes that the writer inserts in his novel for different purposes which represent real historical, social
material for students` better understanding and further analysis of the literary text, particularly if
they have difficulties with a chapter because of its complex presentation of different characters.
For example, a way of introducing the postmodernist character is to begin a discussion on the
definition of the hero, providing classic examples of characters that were considered models in their
society and compare them with antiheroes, the opposite types of characters in postmodernist
literature eliciting their features such as ineffectual, passive, negative and so on. Background

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information can complete the discussion, by explaining students that this character is specific to the
twentieth literature and social context in which it appeared, possibly because many people felt a
sense of alienation and purposelessness in the years after the Second World War. The teacher also
makes sure that students understand that a hero is said to have the positive characteristics of
courage, bravery, enterprise, integrity and both physical and moral strength, or at least some of
these qualities, which will eventually help him to overcome any weaknesses he possesses.
When studying a postmodernist text, there might appear problems in which it is hard for the
students to follow the chronological order of events as it is a common practice that it be disrupted
and sometimes the relation of cause and effect is often disregarded so that the readers are forced to
make their own connections, for example by supplying an interpretation of what motivates a
character`s behavior.
In order to solve this problem it is better to give the student a different text, for example a
traditional ,realist novel to see the difference not only in plots, the relation between chronology and
causation (where the events are usually connected with each other) but also the way characters are
depicted.
Depending on the length of the text, students should be helped to follow the sequence of events,
encouraging them to do some activities such as writing summaries, providing sentence-completion
exercises, reordering jumbled sentences. If the same events are described by two different narrators
in the novel, the teacher can devise a jigsaw reading activity in which groups of students read the
two different descriptions and then compare notes.
The narrative viewpoint is important when analyzing the relation between narrator and characters.
For instance, in first person narratives, the author takes the role of a character and tells the story
from the inside. This can strengthen the impression that the report is authentic, by making the
readers feel involved and able to empathize with the character. On the other hand, the students must
be explained that this usually limits our perspective to this one character`s perceptions. We only see
other characters through this character`s eyes. We should also consider the difference between the
terms focalisation (regarded as a correlative of narration) and point of view. Focalisation is more
analytically precise than the term point of view. The term point of view has visual connotations,
whereas focalisation includes a wider range of perception. Telling and seeing, narration and
focalization are two different processes. The concept of focalization describes the special relation in
which the narrating agency is placed to the story. (Bottez, 79-80).

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Focalisation implies both a performer of the action of perception (a subject, or the focaliser), and an
object of this activity (someone/something that is perceived or the focalized). The focaliser`s
perceptions lend a certain orientation to the narrative. Depending on the position of these two
factors we can distinguish between an external narrator-focaliser (when the perceiving agency is
located at an extradiegetic level, therefore with the narrating agent, the external narrator acting as a
focaliser too) and internal focalization or a character-focaliser (when the represented events are
perceived from the same level, from the perceiving position of a character-focaliser). (Bottez, 81-
82)
As we have only the narrator`s words to go on, we need to ask how far we can trust the narrator
especially in the case of Lodge`s narratives where parody is used and the writer laughs at his
characters` thoughts or actions. It is important that the students know how the narrative point of
view influences the way the events and characters are described; eg. a story told by a narrator who
participates in the events may give only a partial view of them, so that the reader has to
imaginatively infer the rest. Or the position of the narrator in the story may influence which
characters the reader feels the most sympathy for. Part of the meaning of the story is thus indirectly
communicated in its narration.
Third-person narrative offers different possibilities. The author or the narrator may adopt a godlike
position, reporting everything to us, from different places, at different times. We are told how
different characters feel so we see things from more than one perspective. At this point the teacher
should give the student possibility to read and compare a postmodernist text in which the narrator
adopts this omniscient perspective but not in the traditional way. The students should be able to
sense the intention of the postmodernist narrator to use the tradition for different reasons.
Sometimes the author might tell the story dispassionately, without commenting or judging. Usually,
narrators make their presence felt. This should be shown to students by choosing the appropriate
postmodernist text to see the author`s real intention. For instance, in Lodge`s Nice Work the female
protagonist and Vic Willcox are the target of the ironical attack of the narrator.
If we look at a realist novel of Dickens, for instance in Hard Times, we will notice an obvious
authorial intrusion, where the writer enters the narrative to express an opinion or comment on a
situation. Many of Dickens` characters are caricatures whose traits are exaggerated in the extreme.
The effect is comic like in Lodge`s Nice Work but they allow Dickens to make serious points and
express his anger. In both postmodernist and realist novels, a character may be described in

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language we recognize as sarcastic or ironic, making it clear that the author is critical or mocking.
In Hard Times and in Nice Work, characters have comical names, while the central characters who
develop as `real` people are allowed to have ordinary names. The students must be encouraged to
find in the texts both positive and negative judgements, which are revealed by the writer`s choice of
vocabulary.
The teacher should also elicit responses from students regarding the characters in a novel, asking
them to think about how their personalities are affected by events and comment on this by
empathizing or disapproving. The students should be asked to pay attention to how the characters
are presented after the teacher has carefully chosen a few passages or episodes from different parts
of the novel which feature the character to examine in detail. There may be descriptive passages,
moments of dramatic action, episodes where the character contrasts or is in conflict with others.
The teacher has to raise this issue and make the students aware of the various techniques in which
characters can be revealed to us:
-description, in which the author provides an introductory portrait of the character and then builds
up our knowledge with details as the narrative proceeds. Key passages describe main characters or
make us aware of how they change and develop.
-dialogue can give us clues about character`s behavior or personality. Both the narrative statements
of the writer and the dialogues between the participants are involved in the story. The significant
features that have to be considered are: the interaction between the reader and the writer, linguistic
clues about the addresser-addressee relationship, the attitude of the narrator, various patterns of
reporting (direct, indirect speech) and significant changes in style.
-the inner life of the character can be revealed directly by a report of his/her thoughts and feelings.
-the way characters behave or react in certain situations will inform our view of them
-imagery and symbols can contribute to completing a character`s portrait in which a character is
associated symbolically with a color, place or element.
Atmosphere and setting with regard to place can contribute to an understanding of character. The
kind of place that the characters inhabit tell something about them.
Atmosphere or moods such as joy, fear, hope, despair, happiness are always the outcome of the
behavior of characters and the turn of events (Bulman, 22).

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LESSON PLAN 1
Lesson title: The contradictory features of postmodernist character in David Lodge`s Nice Work
Level: 12th grade-advanced
Time: 50 minutes
Skills involved: integrated skills (reading, speaking, writing, listening)
Materials: texts (excerpt from the novel Nice Work), worksheets, CD
PROCEDURE
I. Pre-reading activities:
Objectives: - to simulate students` interest in the text and provoke a discussion relating to their
favorite characters in literature and the concept of character
-to prepare the students for the reading activity by extending their knowledge different
types of characters.
-to provide students with historical and cultural background needed to help them
understand important features of the postmodernist character
Procedure:
Activity 1: students are involved in a class discussion relating to their favorite characters in
literature, motivating their choices and specifying what character features their admired.
The teacher initiates a brainstorming activity to elicit as many words or phrases related to the
concept of character. Students are asked to write them in a table.
Activity 2: The aim of this activity is to make students aware of different types of characters in
literature from different periods of time. Students are given a list consisting of different types of
characters and are asked to match them with the right definition.
Character: god, godlike, hero, non-hero, anti-hero.
Definition of character:
a. he/she is a divine being, superior to other beings. The story about him/her is a myth.
b. he/she is a superior human being and his/her actions are marvelous. The story about him/her is a
legend, a fairy-tale or a folk-tale.
c. he/she is a leader and his/her actions, either good or bad, are courageous. The story about him/her
is an epic or a tragedy.
d. he/she is not superior to other people, he/she is one of us. The story about him/her is a realistic
novel or a comedy.

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e. he/she is unstable, empty, and has no specific goal to achieve. The story about him/her is one of
frustration, absurdity. We meet them in Post-modernist and Absurd literature.
Activity 3: The teacher shows the students some slides containing diagrams and information about
postmodernism, important postmodernist authors and literature. The students are asked to write
three important words to be used in a possible definition of postmodernism.

II. While- reading activities.

Objectives:-to encourage students to read intensively by taking notes which depict Robyn`s main
character traits.
-to aid student understanding and interpretation of the most important features of the postmodernist
character.
-to identify the narrative point of view and its relevance in character-narrator relation and the way
the character is described.
-to elicit students` reactions and attitudes towards the character in the text.
- to increase students` awareness of the importance of some key words in the text concerned with
evaluation and further interpretation of the character.
Procedure
Activity1: Read the following introductory character sketch from Nice Work and, in groups, make
notes on these points:
-What kind of information does the author provide about Robyn and the postmodernist character?
-Do you learn anything of the character`s inner life or just factual or superficial information?
-What type of character is Robyn? How convincing is this character?
-Do you like her? Why (not)?

Activity 2 (group work): Read the extract again and try to identify the way the narrator states the
traits of the main character. Which of the options listed below would you choose? This activity
starts as group work and gradually involves the whole class.
a. The narrator states directly the traits of the character
b. the narrator expresses what the character is like without directly stating a trait.
c. a character states directly the traits of another character
d. a character expresses an evaluation of another character through the use of a drastic action
e. the narrator shows the traits of a character by presenting the character`s inward thoughts.

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f. the narrator shows the traits of the character by presenting the character`s actions.
g. the narrator shows the traits of the character by presenting the character`s speech
h. the narrator shows the character`s traits by presenting the character`s appearance
i. the narrator shows the character`s traits through of analogy (when two different characters are
presented in similar circumstances and the similarities or differences in their responses emphasize
the distinctive traits of both)

Activity 3: Students are asked to write down or underline any word or phrases they can find in the
text describing the concept of `character.` The teacher reminds them that they made a list of words
related to the literary character at the beginning of the lesson. Students are asked to compare their
list of words or phrases with those they found in the text and discuss the differences. They write
them in the table.

III. Post-reading activities

Objectives - to extend and practice students` knowledge of the postmodernist character, features of
postmodernist character (presentation/construction).
Activity: Students are asked to imagine they meet one of their favourite characters or the female
protagonist in Nice Work, Robyn Penrose.
Write the questions you would like to ask your favourite character or Robyn and his/her possible
answers in an interview.

LESSON PLAN 2

Title: Postmodernist character`s development in David Lodge`s Nice Work

Topic: Surprise events
Level: 1oth grade upper-intermediate
Time: 50 minutes
Skills involved: reading, speaking, writing
Procedure
I.Pre- reading activities
Objectives: to raise the students` interest in the topic and reading the text.

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 -to provide students with historical and cultural information needed to deepen their
understanding of the text and characters.
-to provide students with background information and introduce the main characters
Activity 1: the teacher initiates a discussion on places and life exchanges and elicits students`
reactions and feelings. The teacher asks them to imagine what their life would be like if they
worked in a factory for one month and how this new experience would help them to develop as
individuals.
Activity 2: Teacher divides the class in groups of four students and asks them to read and take notes
on specific information in texts about David Lodge`s Nice Work which focuses on important social
and main historical aspects at the time the novel was written as well as on the author`s biography
and some characters` development throughout the novel. Then they report it to the class.
Group 1 should look for information related to social and historical changes in England at the time
when the novel was written.
Group 2 should find out information about writer`s biography
Group 3 should focus on information regarding the character`s life and traits.
The activity extends in a discussion involving the whole class on the relation between the setting,
social background depicted in the texts and the title of the novel, Nice Work.
Activity 3: aiming at helping students organize attributes of the characters and their relationships as
well as predict characters` development. The teacher asks the students to skim though the text again
to search for character traits. Next students should draw large boxes on a sheet of paper for each
character, Robyn Penrose and Vic Willcox, that they are mapping. In the boxes, the students are to
write the names of the characters and their attributes as well as their predictions regarding both
characters` development.
II. While-reading activities.
Objectives: - to check students` predictions of character`s traits
-to draw student`s attention to the techniques used in the text for outlining character`s
features
-to help students understand and interpret the characters` development and their
relationships

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Activity 1: Read the following extract from the novel Nice Work and check your predictions on
characters` traits and their relationship. Underline the words or phrases to sustain your answers.
Write them in your character`s map.

Activity 2: (pair-work) Here is a list of adjectives connected to feelings. Choose the right adjectives
to describe the way each character might feel at the end of their experience and relationship. Then
write down all the examples you can find in the text of details, figures, or gestures describing
Robyn and Vic.
eg. joyful, depressed, overjoyed, cheerful, inconsolable, elated, wise, mature, miserable, broken-
hearted, glum, downcast.
Activity 3: Read the dialogue again and discuss the following questions in pairs or groups:
1. What is the relation between Vic and Robyn now?
2. Is Vic different from what you have learnt so far?
3. Has Roby changed her attitude to university life?
4. What decisions do the characters make?
5. What are the characters` opinions of their workplaces?
6. In their positions, would you have made the same decision? Why or why not?
7. Who do you think Marion is?
8. What does Vic mean by `We`ve had a sort of reconciliation`?
9. What does this tell you about his relation with his family?

III. Post- reading activities

Writing task: Imagine you have just been assigned to be the `shadow` of Robyn at the
university for one week. Write your impressions and new experiences that you have every day
in a diary.

LESSON PLAN 3

Title: Feminine characters in John Fowles`s novel, The French Lieutenant`s Woman
Topic: Women in Victorian England
Level: 12th grade, advanced
Time: 50 minutes

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Skills: speaking, reading, writing, listening
Materials: texts (excerpt from the novel The French Lieutenant`s Woman), worksheets, CD
Procedure
I.Pre-reading activities
Objectives: -to raise students` interest in reading and discussing on the important social and
historical aspects in the Victorian era
-to draw students` attention to the role of women in Victorian England
-to provide students with background information in order to introduce the main topic
of the novel The French Lieutenant`s Woman and the main characters.

Activity 1: Brainstorming, class discussion

– Students are asked to imagine women`s life or in general in the Victorian England. The teacher
writes some of the students` ideas on the blackboard.
Activity 2: (Group work) The teacher shows the students some slides containing diagrams and
information about the Victorian period in England.
Group 1: Take notes on historical, social, scientific and cultural changes in that period. Check your
own predictions.
Group 2: Take notes on the role and life of women in England at that time and check your
predictions.
Activity 3: aiming at preparing the students for reading and creating the atmosphere necessary for
understanding the topic and characters` features.
Students listen to an interview about John Fowles`s life and work and are asked to think of three
questions they would like to ask the writer about the characters in the novel The French Lieutant`s
Woman. They can act out the dialogue.
II. While-reading activities
Objectives: - to give practice in reading for specific information and checking comprehension
-to involve students in discussing and expressing opinions about characters` features
-to aid student understanding and interpretation of the text by assessing the characters in
the text
-to direct students to certain features of style and the effect that it conveys
-to extend students` knowledge of the literary background to the text.

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Activity 1: Read the following extracts from the novel The French Lieutenant`s Woman in which
John Fowles introduces the main female characters, Sarah and Ernestina. Can you find any
elements to remind you of the Victorian period in the way the two female protagonists are depicted?

Activity 2: pair work- Look again at the text and make notes on the following points:
- the number of characters
- the relation between characters
- details about time, place, characters` clothes, characters reactions and mood.

Activity 3: Remember what you have read and learned about the Victorian period. In your opinion,
which character fits the best the Victorian image? What sort of world is it? What is the relationship
between the characters and the world they live in? In what particular instance are the characters
representative of the Victorian society? Support your ideas with underlined words or phrases from
the two texts.
The teacher draws a table consisting of two columns and the names of the two female protagonists
as headings. The students are asked to complete the table by adding characters` features they can
find or guess in the texts. Then they compare and contrast them.
Activity 4: The students are asked to underline as many words as possible that are used to describe
the characters. The teacher writes some of them on the blackboard and asks the students to find
their opposite words.
The teacher starts a class discussion on stylistic analysis of the texts, considering vocabulary, use of
imagery and symbols, figures of speech, the effect they produce.

III. Post-reading activities

Writing task: Imagine you could travel back in the Victorian period for one day. Write your
impressions in a diary.

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 APPENDIX 1

` And there, for the time being, let us leave Vic Wilcox, while we travel an hour or two in time , a
few miles in space, to meet a very different character. A character who, rather awkwardly for me,
doesn't herself believe in the concept of character. That is to say (a favourite phrase of her own),
Robyn Penrose, Temporary Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Rummidge, holds
that `character' is a bourgeois myth, an illusion created to reinforce the ideology of capitalism. As
evidence for this assertion she will point to the fact that the rise of the novel (the literary genre of
`character' par excellence) in the eighteenth century coincided with the rise of capitalism; that the
triumph of the novel over all other literary genres in the nineteenth century coincided with the
triumph of capitalism; and that the modernist and postmodernist deconstruction of the classic novel
in the twentieth century has coincided with the terminal crisis of capitalism. Why the classic novel
should have collaborated with the spirit of capitalism is perfectly obvious to Robyn. Both are
expressions of a secularized Protestant ethic, both dependent on the idea of an autonomous
individual self who is responsible for and in control of his/her own destiny, seeking happiness and
fortune in competition with other autonomous selves. This is true of the novel considered both as
commodity and as mode of representation. (Thus Robyn in full seminar spate.) That is to say, it
applies to novelists themselves as well as to their heroes and heroines. The novelist is a capitalist of
the imagination. He or she invents a product which consumers didn't know they wanted until it is
made available, manufactures it with the assistance of purveyors of risk capital known as
publishers, and sells it in competition with makers of marginally differentiated products of the same
kind. The first major English novelist, Daniel Defoe, was a merchant. The second, Samuel
Richardson, was a printer. The novel was the first mass-produced cultural artefact. (At this point
Robyn, with elbows tucked into her sides, would spread her hands outwards from the wrist, as if to
imply that there is no need to say more. But of course she always has much more to say.) ` ( David
Lodge , Nice Work, 39-40)

`So these are things that are worrying Robyn Penrose as she drives through the gates of the
University, with a nod and a smile to the security man in his little glass sentry box: her lecture on
the Industrial novel, her future job, and her relation with Charles-in that order of conspicuousness
rather than importance. Indeed, her uneasiness about Charles scarcely counts as a worry at all, while

85
the worry about the lecture is, she is well aware, a trivial and mechanical one. It is not that she does
not know what to say, it is that there is not enough time to say all she knows. After all, she worked
on the nineteenth century industrial novel for something like ten years, and even after publishing
her book she went on accumulating ideas and insights about the subject. She has boxes full of notes
and ifle cards on it. She probably knows more about the nineteenth century industrial novel than
anyone else in the entire world. How can all that knowledge be condensed into a fifty-
minute lecture to students who know almost nothing about it? The interest of scholarship and
pedagogy are at odds here. What Robyn likes to do is to deconstruct the texts, to probe the gaps and
absences in them, to uncover what they are not saying, to expose their ideological bad faith, to cut a
cross-section through the twisted strands of their semiotic codes and literary conventions. What the
students want her to do is to give her some basic facts that will enable them to read the novels as
simple straight-forward reflections of `reality`, and to write simple, straightforward, exam-passing
essays about them.`( David Lodge, Nice Work, 59-60)

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 APPENDIX 2

'As usual, there is somebody waiting to see her, standing by her door. When she gets closer she
sees that it is Vic Wilcox: she didn't recognize him immediately because he is not wearing his
usual dark business suit, but a short-sleeved knitted shirt and neatly pressed light-weight trousers.
He is carrying two books in his hand.
`I wasn`t expecting you`, unlocking the door of her office. `Are you making up for what you
missed yesterday?
`No,` he says, following her into the room, and closing the door. `I`ve come to tell you that I
won`t be coming any more`.
`Oh`, she says. `Well, it doesn`t matter. Teaching is nearly over now. You wouldn`t find it much
fun watching me mark exam scripts. Is there some crisis at Pringle`s, then?`
`I`m finished with Pringle`s`, he says. Pringle`s has been sold to the group that owns Foundrax.
That`s what the phone call was about yesterday. I`m unemployed, as from today.` He raises his
hands and gestures at his casual clothes as if they are a sign of his fallen state.
When he has related all the details to her, she says, ` But can they do that to you? Chuck you out,
just like that, without notice?`
`Afraid so.`
` But it`s monstrous!`
`Once they`ve made up their minds, they don`t mess around. They know I could screw up the
entire company if I stayed another week, in revenge. Not that I would be bothered.`
` I`m very sorry Vic. You must feel devastated`. He shrugs. `Win some, lose some. In a funny
sort of way it`s had a good side. Misfortune draws a family together. ` Marjorie`s not too upset?`
` Marjorie`s been terrific,` says Vic. `As a matter of fact`- he rakes back his forelock and looks
nervously away from her-` We`ve had a sort of reconciliation. I thought I ought to tell you.`
`I`m glad,` says Robyn gently. ` I`m really glad to hear that`.
`I just wanted to get things straight,` he says glancing at her apprehensively. `I`m afraid I`ve been
a bit foolish.`
`Don`t worry about it.`
`I`ve been living in a dream. This business has woken me up. I must have been out of my mind,
imagining you would see anything in a middle- aged dwarf engineer`. Robyn laughs.
`You`re a special person, Robyn,` he says solemnly. ` One day you`ll meet a man who deserves
to marry you.`
` I don`t need a man to complete me,` she says, smiling. `That`s because you haven`t met him
yet.`
`As a matter of fact, I had an offer this very morning,` she says lightly.
His eyes widen. `Who from?`
`Charles.`
`Are you going to accept?`
`No`, she says. ` And what are going to do now? Look for another job, I suppose.`
`No, I`ve had enough of the rate-race.`
`You mean you are going to retire?`
`I can`t afford to retire. Anyway, I`d be lost without work.`
` You could do an English degree as a mature student.`
She smiles, not entirely serious, not entirely joking. `I`m thinking of setting up on my own. You
remember that idea I mentioned to you for a spectrometer? I talked to Tom Rigby last night, and
he`s game.`

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`That`s a marvelous idea! It`s just the right opportunity. ` It`s a question of raising the necessary
capital.` (David Lodge, Nice Work, 379-380)

88
 APPENDIX 3

` Ernestina had exactly the right face for her age; that is, small-chinned, oval, delicate as a violet.
You may see it still in the drawings of the great illustrators of the time- in Phiz`s work, in John
Leech`s. Her gray eyes and the paleness of her skin only enhanced the delicacy of the rest. At first
meetings she could cast down her eyes very prettily, as if she might faint should any gentleman dare
to address her. But there was a minute tilt at the corner of her eyelids, and a corresponding tilt at the
corner of her lips- to extend the same comparison, as faint as the fragrance of February violets- that
denied, very subtly but quite unmistakably, her apparent total obeisance to the great god Man. An
orthodox Victorian would perhaps have mistrusted that imperceptible hint of a Becky Sharp; but to
a man like Charles she proved irresistible. She was so very nearly one of the prim little moppets, the
Georgians, Victorias, Albertinas, Matildas and the rest who sat in their closely guarded dozens at
every ball; yet not quite.`( John Fowles, The French Lieutenant`s Woman, 25)

` She (Sarah) had taken off her bonnet and held it in her hand; her hair was pulled tight back inside
the collar of the black coat- which was bizarre, more like a man`s riding coat than any woman`s
coat that had been in fashion those past forty years. She too was a stranger to the crinoline; but it
was equally plain that that out of oblivion, not knowledge of the latest London taste. Charles made
some trite and loud remark, to warn her that she was no longer alone, but she did not turn. The
couple moved to where they could see her face in profile; and how her stare was aimed like a rifle
at the farthest horizon. There came a stronger gust of wind, one that obliged Charles to put his arm
round Ernestina`s waist to support her, and obliged the woman to cling more firmly to the bollard.
Without quite knowing why, perhaps to show Ernestina how to say boo to a goose, he stepped
forward as soon as the wind allowed.
``My good woman, we can`t see you here without being alarmed for your safety. A stronger
squall.``
She turned to look at him- or as it seemed to Charles, through him. It was not so much what was
positively in that face which remained with him after that first meeting, but all that was not as he
had expected; for theirs was an age when the favored feminine look was the demure, the obedient,
the shy. Charles felt immediately as if he had trespassed; as if the Cobb belonged to that face, like
Ernestina`s. It was certainly not a beautiful face. Its sorrow welled out of it as purely, naturally and
unstoppably as water out of a wood-land spring. There was no artifice there, no hypocrisy, no

89
hysteria, no mask; and above all, no sign of madness. The madness was in the empty sea, the empty
horizon, the lack of reason for such sorrow; as if the spring was natural in itself, but unnatural in
welling from a desert`.( John Fowles, The French Lieutenant`s Woman, 9-10)

90
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