Zadie Smith's White Teeth

Meshari Alanazi

ENGL 8476

06 April 2015

Dr. Carey Mickalites

A Response Paper on White Teeth by Zadie Smith

The themes of Identity and Heredity are important elements of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Identity, as generally comprehended, is the way in which a person looks at his/her own behavior and his/her own feeling about who he/she is as a person. However, heredity, in this context, can be defined as the identity that a person gets from the identities of his/her parents; who they are and what their behaviors, customs and traditions may be. In White Teeth, these two types of identity are always conflicting with each other. Most of the main characters of the novel are, to some extent, having troubles defining their identities.

Samad Miah Iqbal is an immigrant from Bangladesh who was raised in a highly religious family that care much about their traditions. Samad now lives in England in which he found a completely

She is only characterized by her past and by her mother’s religion that her mother, Hortense, forces her to spread its news at school. Therefore, Clara struggles to find herself an identity that does not include her religion or her mother, which touches the defining line that separates identity from heredity. Although her mother wants Clara’s religion and past to define her, the girl resists this identity and struggles to find her own. Finally, the events of the novel lead Clara into Archie’s arms which allows her to begin a new and different life than the one her mother wanted for her: “Clara saw Archie through the gray-green eyes of loss; her world had just disappeared, the faith she lived by had receded like a low tide, and Archie, quite by accident, had become the bloke in the joke; the last man on earth” (38). Both Archie and Clara were in thirst to find each other, Archie found his new direction in life and Clara found a different life than her previous “preset”