White Teeth

By the end of Part 3, it is clear that Samad’s plans to dictate his sons’ lives have gone awry; as he himself puts it, sending Magid to Bangladesh has ironically resulted in a son who is “[m]ore English than the English” (336). Moreover, Magid is determined to import these attitudes to Bangladesh, influenced by Marcus’s belief that humans ought to be able to control every aspect of their own destiny. Of course, the very fact that Samad’s attempts to control his sons’ futures have gone disastrously wrong suggests that Marcus and Magid will find their attempts to master fate and chance more difficult than they anticipate. It is worth remembering that Magid’s initial desire to conquer fate was sparked by a vase falling on him during a storm; Smith described this vase as leading Magid “by the nose to his vocation” (178). In other words, Magid’s discovery of Chalfenism is itself a foregone conclusion resulting from a random accident.

Meanwhile, Irie has arrived at a different conclusion regarding fate and chance. When Samad, despairing over what has become of his sons, laments that he “begin[s] to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident,” Irie is “ashamed to find that the land of accidents sounded like paradise to her. Sounded like freedom” (337). In other words, Irie places her hope in the very randomness that everyone from Samad to Marcus despises. This is significant because White Teeth ultimately places a great deal of hope in the unexpected and accidental; it is moments that disrupt long-established patterns that secure the novel’s happy ending. Therefore, it is not surprising that, of all the novel’s characters, Irie proves the most capable of balancing historical baggage with personal freedom.

Finally, Irie’s time in the Bowden household expands on a motif that has been present throughout the novel: the apocalypse. For Hortense and Ryan, the end of the world is a real and pressing concern that impacts the way they live day-to-day: “[E]very service in the house, from the milkman to the electricity, was paid for on a strictly daily basis so as not to spend money on utilities or goods that would be wasted should God turn up in all his holy vengeance the next day” (327). Even characters who do not expect the world to literally end in the near future often think about the apocalypse, or use it as a way of framing their decision-making process. Samad, for instance, encourages Archie at one point to think about how he would act when “the walls are falling in, and the sky is dark, and the ground is rumbling” (87). There are many reasons why the idea of apocalypse looms large in White Teeth, including the fact that the period in which the novel is set seemed like an especially precarious time to many. It is significant, though, that the idea of the world ending comes as a relief to many of the novel’s characters and not only for religious reasons. In a sense, the apocalypse promises what so many of these characters are looking for: an end to the progression of time and the changes that that carries with it.