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White Teeth Identity Quotes

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Midnight Chit-Chats
In Zadie Smiths novel White Teeth, she depicts Irie as a curvy, Jamaican teenage girl living in an English society, dealing with identity struggles. Her conflicts with herself stem from the untold truths of her parents and their pasts, which hung over Irie until she got frustrated had had enough and started to look for the full truth. The use of Irie’s absurd conflict with her mother at night, lifts from the weight of the seriousness and more serious themes of the book, yet at the same time highlights Smith’s underlying theme of identity and teenage angst.
Zadie Smith includes the argument between Irie and her mother to represent that though this is such a complex book, there are still the subtle tendencies of parent and teenage struggles that a lot of families, everywhere, deal with. All in all, families are families and teenagers, are, well, teenagers. Irie wants to take a year off to go to Africa but she and her mother are in quite the disagreement about her plans. This conflict between Irie and Clara becomes so serious that they stake out different areas in the house and and pretty much play the silent game. That is, until Irie cracks and wakes her mother up in the middle of the night. She believes that in the middle of the night, she is more likely to get what she wants and that, “it was such a well-worn tactic that until now Irie had not considered it worthy of this, her fiercest and longest dispute with her mother. But she hadn’t any better ideas” (312). (don’t end with quote)
While it seems tragic that the characters of Zadie Smiths novel have a difficult time identifying who they are in their own personal way, the relatable and absurd way Smith writes their stories lifts away some of the seriousness of the novel. In the scene, pages 312-314, Irie chooses to walk into her parent’s room in the middle of the night to ask about leaving the country for a year. This is such an absurd thing to do in the middle of the night, that it makes it funny. Adding on to the humor, is the fact that Irie feels totally and utterly betrayed that she did not know about her mother’s fake teeth, enough so that she packs up her bag and leaves the house in the middle of the night. (integrate) “She’d had

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