White Teeth essays
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The search for identity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is one of the threads that Smith continually weaves throughout her novel. At one point or another, each character deals with the inevitable question of “Who am I?” From Irie’s search for an identity through her family history to Samad’s futile resistance to all things British, it becomes clear that the multiculturalism of modern London is making it increasingly difficult to align one’s self with a singular culture or background. Through...
4 Pages
1688 Words
Zadie Smith is a British author, essayist and professor of creative writing. She was born in North London in 1975. Her father is a working-class Caucasian English man and her mother is a Jamaican immigrant. Since childhood she got absorbed in every book. In one of the interviews, she said that she “inhales” books and takes them with her in dinner time because she feels that they are a meal in themselves. Zadie attended King’s College in Cambridge where she...
6 Pages
2873 Words
In White Teeth by Zadie Smith, reminders of the past are everywhere, not always flattering to their subjects, and it at times seemingly all-consuming for the characters. For Smith, the past is so crucial that she begins the novel with a line from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “What’s past is prologue” suggesting that history and the past have a profound and inescapable impact. White Teeth winds through the years of an altogether unexpected life-long friendship between Bengali immigrant Samad Iqbal...
3 Pages
1532 Words
What is unique about the narrative form in which each novel is written? White Teeth’s ability to switch time periods and characters in a chronological flow at the same time, allows the readers to see how every sequence in one’s life ripples and changes others. The excessively descriptive stance that Smith takes by criticizing the appearance and personality traits of every character creates an even more omniscient, wide lense of the character’s reality. Smith focuses on encompassing descriptions to inform...
2 Pages
1102 Words
In White Teeth, ideological circulation is literally circular, because the vast majority of people are too obdurate to even listen to others’ views, much less alter their own belief systems. The inflexible and almost fanatic nature of belief, as well as the relentless need of different factions to publicize their opinions regardless of the result, reveals that something about ideology resists reality, that common sense does not carry over to the world of credo. Even letters sound like they are...
3 Pages
1591 Words
Since even before its publication in 2000, Zadie Smith’s debut novel White Teeth has been surrounded by intense hype and media publicity. Smith’s status as a young black female writer who received a quarter million pounds advance on a first book no doubt fueled the frenzy and made her a popular talking point. Today, the majority of audiences and critics would agree that the book lived up to its hype. Translated into over 20 languages, praised by veteran writers and...
3 Pages
1464 Words
