In her novel, White Teeth, Zadie Smith tells the story of two wartime friends, Samad Iqbal and Archie Jones, and their families in London. The story focuses on the latter half of their lives, while continuing to look back on their history as friends and comrades in arms. Alfred “Archie” Jones is an ordinary and uncertain man, preferring to make his most important decisions with the flip of a coin. The story begins with his ex-wife, Ophelia Diagilo, walking out on him apparently driven insane by his mediocrity. In a coin toss decision he attempts suicide, only to be interrupted which leads him to meet Clara, who he later marries. Clara is a Jamaican woman who is less than half his age; she has abandoned her religion as a Jehovah's Witness, and is missing her two front teeth. Together Archie and Clara have a daughter named Irie, who becomes mixed up with the three characters of the second generation. Archie's best friend is Samad Iqbal, a Bengali Muslim from Bangladesh. The two men served together in World War II in the British Army, they were part of a tank crew which worked its way through Europe in the final days of World War II, leaving Samad with a crippled right hand. Samad Iqbal immigrated to Britain and married Alsana Iqbal, where he now works as waiter and the two have twin boys, Magid and Millat, who are the same age as Irie. The reader follows these characters’ stories and their creation of their own covers stories, for as Stuart Hall puts it, “identity is within discourse, wishing representation...identity is a narrative of the self, it's the story we tell about the self in order to know who we are” (Hall). This novel focuses on the intercultural identities formed through emigration, ethnicity, generations, and religion...
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...nce for ethnic differences is continuously halted by comedic deflation instead of submission. Rather than letting the issue of skin color rule the communication, Smith handles it tactfully as if to say racism is out-of-date in this society.
The novel ends in a continuation of the story, or as Smith originally puts it, a prologue for the future. The ending is anything but an ending. Instead it becomes the beginning of something new. This novel deals with the treatment of immigrants, effects of religion science, love, war, memory, history, race and ethnicity, family education class, and more; all of which factor into the creation of identity for these characters across cultures and generations. Zadie Smith takes on the challenge of deepening each character beyond a single trait of identity and uses it to further the interpretation of communication across the globe.
...inds love along the way. She makes rash decisions in bad situations, faces the truth that she has been avoiding, and finds her place in the world. While her journey takes some unexpected twists, Lily learns to make the best of what she has, and go for what she wants. She learns to move on from the past, and make a brighter future. But most importantly, Lily learns to accept that life is unpredictable and that by doing her best Lily is living life the way she wants to.
Flashing forward a few years later past the days of Jim Crow and the fight for civil rights, several, but not all in the younger generation see the members of the black and white race as equal and find it hard to fathom that only a few years ago the atmosphere surrounding racial relations was anything but pleasant. Whites and blacks have co-existed for many hundreds of years, but as Tyson points ...
He effectively moves from a position of “Other” to one of empowerment through his active participation in the Civil Rights movement, and his comedy. In fact, Gregory views comedy as “friendly relations,” allowing him to abandon his repressed identity—one that was “mad and mean inside” (134)—and move to a position of empowerment that allows Gregory to “make jokes about [whites] and their society” (Gregory 132). Through his comedy, Gregory is also able to dissociate himself from the term “nigger,” as well as the namelessness, de-individuation, and dehumanizing effects associated with it: “Every white man in America knows we are Americans, knows we are Negroes, and some of them know us by our names. So when he calls us a nigger, he’s calling us something we are not, something that exists only in his mind. So if nigger exists only in his mind, who’s the nigger?” (Gregory 201). In refusing to adopt the word and its negative connotations as self-definition, Gregory “returns” the word and its negativity to the dominant society of the white middle class—the discriminatory “. . . system that makes a man less than a man, that teaches hate and fear and ignorance” (Gregory
Her realization that she is not alone in her oppression brings her a sense of freedom. It validates her emerging thoughts of wanting to rise up and shine a light on injustice. Her worries about not wanting to grow up because of the harsh life that awaits her is a common thought among others besides the people in her community. As she makes friends with other Indians in other communities she realizes the common bonds they share, even down to the most basic such as what they eat, which comforts her and allows her to empathize with them.
Typically, a novel contains four basic parts: a beginning, middle, climax, and the end. The beginning sets the tone for the book and introduces the reader to the characters and the setting. The majority of the novel comes from middle where the plot takes place. The plot is what usually captures the reader’s attention and allows the reader to become mentally involved. Next, is the climax of the story. This is the point in the book where everything comes together and the reader’s attention is at the fullest. Finally, there is the end. In the end of a book, the reader is typically left asking no questions, and satisfied with the outcome of the previous events. However, in the novel The Things They Carried the setup of the book is quite different. This book is written in a genre of literature called “metafiction.” “Metafiction” is a term given to fictional story in which the author makes the reader question what is fiction and what is reality. This is very important in the setup of the Tim’s writing because it forces the reader to draw his or her own conclusion about the story. However, this is not one story at all; instead, O’Brien writes the book as if each chapter were its own short story. Although all the chapters have relation to one another, when reading the book, the reader is compelled to keep reading. It is almost as if the reader is listening to a “soldier storyteller” over a long period of time.
In this way the novel ends on the course of despair that it began in
The culmination of the novel is when Maya describes her eighth grade graduation. Angelou, her classmates, and parents listen to the condescending and racist manner in which the guest speaker talks. After listening to his insults, Maya realizes "she is the master of her fate" which was expressed in the valedictory address given by her classmate. Maya becomes a single parent at the age of eighteen, bu...
Similarly, the book’s three leading protagonists ultimately possess a common objective, escaping their unjust circumstances in pursuit of seeking the “warmth of other suns.” For this reason, they abandon the laws of Jim Crow and the familiarity of their hometowns as they flee to a better life. In the process, they all assume a level of risk in their decisions to rebel against the system. For example, Ida decides to embark on a precarious journey while in the beginning stages of a clandestine pregnancy. Any number of unpredictable events could have resulted from this judgment, including fatality. All of the migrants shared an unspoken agreement that the rewards would far outweigh the dangers involved.
...reader to walk away, giving anyone the chance who is willing to stand against the injustices of society. She uses her own personal afflictions in order to better create a stronger, individualized woman after the acquisition of hope. She uses her story; she enlists the help of the reader to put justice and hope back into society. Therefore, "Let us begin."
In her premiere novel White Teeth, Zadie Smith presents four distinct, yet overlapping, families: the Bowdens, the Jones, the Iqbals, and the Chalfens. Through these families, Smith subverts the archetypal gender imbalance of the fundamentalist religious family by contrasting the matriarchal Bowdens and Iqbals--who are Jehovah’s Witness and Muslims, respectively--with the secular, patriarchal Chalfen family.
When Zora Hurston wrote this novel, she wanted to explain how a young women search for her own identity. This young woman would go through three relationships that took her to the end of the journey of a secure sense of independence. She wanted to find her own voice while in a relationship, but she also witnessed hate, pain, and love through the journey. When Logan Killicks came she witnessed the hate because he never connected physically or emotionally to her. Jody Starks, to what she assumed, as the ticket to freedom. What she did not know was the relationship came with control and pain. When she finally meets Tea Cake she was in love, but had to choose life over love in the end.
...it up to each reader to draw their own conclusions and search their own feelings. At the false climax, the reader was surprised to learn that the quite, well-liked, polite, little convent girl was colored. Now the reader had to evaluate how the forces within their society might have driven such an innocent to commit suicide.
Presumably, complications start to revolve around the protagonist family. Additionally, readers learn that Rachel mother Nella left her biological father for another man who is abusive and arrogant. After,
William Apess then asks his mostly white audience to reexamine their Christian values along with their prejudices. His essay acknowledges that unless the discrimination and prejudices that plague the white man over the other races disappear, then there won’t be peace in the Union.
Throughout the novel the reader finds out that one cannot stew over a negative situation, but instead, find the positive in a negative situation and move on to better things. In addition, people should always be themselves because we all matter, no matter what our differences.