Zadie Smiths White Teeth Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Zadie Smiths White Teeth - Essay Example The author reflects on the multifaceted impact that cultural history can have on identity thus examining the masculine experience. The story revolves around the generational evaluation of masculinity and the altering of the social codes to insist that there is not always a solution to the dilemma of constituting the gender and cultural identity. Similarly, the text examines the dialogic motion between an individual's beginnings or stabilities in the past and the successive pathways that join several route points. Therefore underscoring the vital intersections of the roots needed to negotiate masculine identities in the novel postcolonial world. The text uses humor and irony to ease some of the tension and to expose the difficulties that arise when a particular type of masculinity is thought as a fixed idea that men should live up to. The comical plethora and ironic scenes throughout the text are precisely used. They defuse cultural conflicts that are entrenched in and occurring from the politics involved in negotiating contemporary masculinity in the face of a multifaceted and compelling history of colonialism. The first generation of men in the text has adopted the values and social codes set out for them by the past’s British Empire placing an intensified significance on heritage and integration. Samad and Marcus have attempted to instill these principles in their sons. The text maps the desires of the first generation of men to negotiate purely masculine personalities in order to succeed in a community that is marked by nostalgia for a past greatness. These men signify confused masculinities in search of a cultural identity and a life that men in a community have guaranteed them. They were so dedicated to macho values during an imperialist regime establishment.