This passage from David Lodge's Nice Work raises the two main issues that this chapter explores: our readiness to imbue with both individuality and reality entities that we know do not exist (we “meet” Robyn as we would a living person), and twentieth-century criticism's erosion of our investments in novelistic character, as something to be questioned rather than taken for granted (Robyn “doesn't believe in the concept of character”). Clearly having read her Ian Watt (see Chapter 2), Robyn believes that character represents an “illusion” of a self-motivating individual invented in the eighteenth century to serve the interests of an emergent capitalist society; by this she means that the novel is both a product and a conduit of capitalist ideology because it imagines human beings only as competitive, acquisitive individuals and then makes this view of selfhood seem naturally and self-evidently true. It is less clear that Robyn's author agrees.