In White Teeth, Zadie Smith develops characters obsessed with precision, categorization, and decisions. This is why Samad's punishment for making the sole decision to send their son to Bangladesh is for Alsana to leave him in a constant state of ambiguity. "'Perhaps none, Samad Miah.' Maybe everything. Alsana refuses to answer with certainty even Samad's most trivial questions. The stranger pushes Samad into the wall and worse, his son comes back more "English" than "Bangladeshi" anyway, destroying Samad's hopes of seeing a son come out the way he wanted and definitively proving that his choice to send Magid was incorrect. It seems that Smith's book punishes those who seek racial or cultural purity. The more the characters strive for precision and correct calculation, the more they are overcome by the fate of the book. In this article, I will primarily review the characters of Samad, Archie and Irie to identify their tendencies towards certainty and analyze how this element of their personality shapes them. I will relate these elements to the damnation of the characters to show how the book argues for the acceptance of fluidity rather than multiculturalism. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essayAs briefly shown in the previous paragraph, Samad Iqbal is determined to be sure. He is attached to the history of his ancestors, drawing meaning from the past that controls who he is in the present. Samad believes his great-grandfather, Pandes, was a hero in Bangladesh. He tells the story of the war to everyone repeatedly, even begging for Pandes' photo to be hung in a local bar. The more he gets into the story, the more those around him verify the facts. Unfortunately for Samad, most historical evidence suggests that his great-grandfather was not actually a hero. Despite the damning facts, Samad desperately clings to the information he has to prove that his family was indeed great. His desire for the past distracts him from living in the present, leading him to try to apply his roots to things that no longer exist (and never really existed since we learn that Pande was not the person that Samad claims to be), failing him. The structure of the book itself also attempts to let the past control the present. In “Chance and gesture in Zadie Smith's White Teeth and The Autograph Man: a model of multicultural identity? Jonathan Sell writes that "the foregrounding of the present in the novel means that the past is pushed into the background and stripped of its conventional prerogative to shape the present, while the usual sequence of cause and effect casts blends into a more liquid and arbitrary world. relationship of analogy or fortuitous contingency” (2006). This interesting analysis also allows us to show how the book attempts to transcend time, skipping a lot but always moving forward in the average direction. Marcus Chalfen is also for excluding chance and taking total control of destiny. He even says that his Future Mouse “presents the tantalizing promise of a new phase in human history where we will not be victims of chance but rather directors and arbiters of our own destiny.” Sell ​​also finds this rooting in Marcus Chalfen “who believes that if “[you] eliminate chance, you rule the world.” (2006). Although not obsessed with conventional race, Chalfen is very attached to his family's culture of "Chalfenism." Family members constantly boast of their cultural superiority and know exactlywhich elements are "Chalfenist", as Joshua thinks Irie might have roots. Their attachment to Chalfenism is no different from Samad's attachment to the Bangladeshi roots that he wants to impose on his family. . The difference is that Samad is obsessed with the past while Marcus is obsessed with the future (literally, his entire project has the word Future in it). Neither are currently living. Even with the most trivial measures, the characters in this novel cannot understand them correctly. After being caught brandishing weed, Joshua Chalfen must measure out an eighth of tobacco to prove he is a drug dealer. As if he knows the difference, he asks if he should show them "an eighth European or an eighth English." He withdraws an amount that isn't anywhere close either, embarrassing himself. Although pale in comparison to the other characters in this book, Joshua's stubbornness and determination lead to miscalculations. The mouse behind which Marcus Chalfen and Magid are standing represents “just a certainty.” Just certainty in its purest form. The end of the book boils down to an epic battle over a mouse representing the characteristics I described: precision and control. The characters are divided on one side or the other of the debate, except for those who really can't form an opinion. Interestingly, Marcus/Magid are on one side of the debate and Samad/Joshua on the other. This shows how imposing culture on children inevitably fails, even when relying entirely on the characters. What happens though is that both kids are still equally very determined people, interested in precision and certainty, they've just crossed over to the other side. Despite Samad's obsession with decision-making, he still believes in destiny created by God and also uses coins to make his choices, just like Archie. Samad's problem is distancing himself from real choices while creating the appearance of decision. He can seemingly never make a choice without worrying for a long time, then let a coin or God make the real call. The idea of ​​separating two brothers, one of Bangladeshi descent and the other of contemporary England, shows the inability to choose just one race, instead trying to experience both. What Samad doesn't understand is that there was a "root canal". Once a generation crossed borders, there was no going back; the root has been deleted. The Jehovah's Witnesses in the novel are not exempt from this analysis and correlation and are probably the most obvious example of criticism for not living in the present. Every time a date they claim to be the end of the world passes smoothly, they notice a calculation error that caused the inaccurate prediction and proclaim a new date. Without being obsessed with dividing their movement along racial or cultural lines, they on the contrary exclude women from access to their movement at a higher level. They spend the time leading up to the proclaimed date preparing and living fully for that date. Jehovah's Witnesses thus live in the future rather than in the past, which always leads them to waste their lives. Their determinism in faith as well as their distance from women distract them most of the time from being rational human beings. Unlike Samad, Archie Jones is willing to leave everything to chance. He uses a coin to decide between life and death twice (both resulting in life). Even meeting Clara is a completely random event. Archie doesn't seem interested in making choices himself, but he still demands one instead of letting thingsopen. This means that Archie is still in favor of sending one of Samad's children to Bangladesh and choosing a side for Future Mouse, it just means that he doesn't bother to think about the decision. In her presentation at the literary symposium, Paula mentioned the incident where the children went to deliver a care package to an old white man who tells them a war story about using the contrast of white teeth on brown skin to determine who to kill. The problem was that when the teeth rotted, it was hard to tell who the bad guy was. Paula says this is another example of ambiguity in the novel leading to a decision that results in life or death. Especially when we remember that the teeth in this novel represent rootedness and tradition, the book seems to argue that when culture or race is not defined, safety is assured (because you are harder to target). Archie's passive nature towards the decision is passed on to his daughter. Irie Jones is easily influenced, a victim of the choices others make for her. Most notably, this comes when she learns that her idol, Marcus Chalfen, thinks she can be the equivalent of a dentist but nothing more. She quickly changes her career aspirations and heads to dental school, giving Chalfen jurisdiction over the choices that should have been his. This section is still set in a time where Irie is struggling with her identity (which is typical for someone her age but her struggle is rooted in race which is more interesting than the average non-mixed teenager). In “The mouseness of the mouse: The concurrent discourses of Genetics and History in White Teeth” by Michele Braun, she writes that Irie “wants to become one with the Chalfens, to separate herself from “the chaotic and random flesh of her own family and [be] transgenically merged with another. A unique animal. A new breed” (2013). In Irie's imagination, the hybridity of a transgenic animal is seductive. This allows her to dream of escaping the tyranny of her family life and her half-black, half-white bodily features, because she imagines that a mixed identity will transcend the boundaries of "black or white." At this point in the novel, Irie is intrigued by the mixing of cultures and races to achieve the best in multiculturalism. She has not yet learned to reject these things outright. When I claim that the novel argues for fluidity, I am not talking about multiculturalism. I actually think the novel takes a much more radical stance and argues for a total rejection of culture based on geographic or racial lines. In "After the Century of Strangers: Hospitality and Crashing in Zadie Smith's White Teeth," Ryan Trimm writes that "Smith's novel uses the family as a miniature of the nation, a well-known cliché about how domestic units transform." social processes into natural processes. , instinctive”, a process emphasizing racial homogeneity. (2015). I think Trimm is right in his analysis, that this novel shows the downsides of prioritizing things like racial homogeneity, but I think they are wrong when they call it a well-known cliché because I think that Smith's allegory shows something different. Rather than denouncing only racial homogeneity, Smith denounces every instance of certainty, of borders, of value at borders. I think that's what makes this novel unique and interesting. Hoping for certain outcomes usually leaves characters disappointed. When Archie hopes for certain results, like his half-black, blue-eyed daughter, he is usually disappointed. Archie doesn't really take race into account when making the decision to be.. 2016.