There are also students´ manuscripts, e-mails - Ralph´s with spelling mistakes, of course - notice the subjects! (my proposal, your proposal - on and on it goes).
Then there is a 3rd person omniscient narrator that retells what is going on. However old-fashioned it may sound, at least you feel it is more objective.
And then there are those time loops which draw you backwards and forwards in time as if time never existed. There is no time in your consciousness. Anyway, even if most modern novels are about consciousness, Ralph isn´t interested in them. He only appreciates Ulysses - early chapters are remarkable, but then he seemed to get distracted by stylistic games and crosswords puzzles.

Ralph often expresses his critical opinions about real writers - what makes you believe Ralph is a real person, e.g. Virginia Woolf is too genteel, too poetic. All her characters sound like V.Woolf.
It was A. Huxley who said that man is eternally alone. Try as we might, we simply cannot get into another's mind. We never truly know just what is going on there. And, however much we might try, we can never, not truly, let someone else into ours.
Without giving away the story, a series of events push Messenger and Helen to reconcile with the distinctness of being human.

DAVID LODGE
"Certainly my novels are full of irony, both dramatic irony, and rhetorical irony, which is associated with comedy and satire. But you are right that there is also a softer, more emotionally tender (and some of my critics would say, sentimental) aspect to my work. I don’t see any contradiction in this. One of my great artistic heroes is Dickens who is both ironic and emotional to the point of sentimentality in different aspects of his work. I would not reject the description “considerate comic novelist”. “Compassionate” might be a better word."

"How you end a story crucially affects the impression it leaves on the reader about the implied author’s attitude to life. I am fascinated by this question of endings, and have written about it in several critical essays. As modern literary novelists go, I think I am more drawn than most to the old-fashioned “happy ending”, and have sometimes been criticised for it, though you don’t seem to agree. I tend to leave my characters in an open-ended situation, but a hopeful one, with the major problems they have confronted in the story resolved.