Category: White Teeth

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…

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…

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 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,…

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…

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,…