White Teeth: Allusions 7 key examples

The elaborate simile claims that even though Ryan Topps is not directly important to many of the other characters in the novel, he is still important to understand Clara's story. In the same way, the narrator argues, a historian trying to understand why Nazi Germany never invaded Britain would have to understand the history of Hitler's other campaigns far across Europe. The simile shows that the narrator conceives of the book as a complete history of the events of the main characters' lives, and every detail must be presented to the reader.

The specific historical allusion in the simile is also important to the novel. Smith references Generalplan Ost, or "Master Plan in the East," in which the Third Reich planned to conquer and colonize most of eastern Europe up to the Ural Mountains as "living space" for the German people. As the narrator describes, this was a similar ambition to those of the French Empire under Napoleon. Hitler considered this campaign a higher priority than western Europe, but the invasion of Russia became one of the costliest military campaigns in world history. For this and other reasons, Hitler never attempted an invasion of the United Kingdom. While the British did certainly suffer in the war, the ruling monarchy remained intact and was never usurped by the Nazis. 

It is precisely this historical situation that allows for the British empire to persist well past the end of the war. This results in the system of immigration, particularly from former colonies in South Asia, which creates the multiracial social fabric depicted in the novel. The relationship between a declining but still surviving empire and growing immigrant populations forms a fundamental problem in the book. The narrator references Hitler's ambitions in the east both as a comparison to justify the inclusion of Ryan Topps and as a reference to important historical context for the book's situation.

Millat and his gang walk with a "glorified, funky limp," a nonchalant but clearly intentional choice. This resembles "the slow, padding movement that Yeats imagined for his rough millennial beast." Yeats, the most important Irish poet of the early 20th century, imagined this beast in "The Second Coming," a short poem that describes the broken, disenchanted world that followed World War I. The poem tells of "a shape with a lion body and the head of a man" that "is moving its slow thighs" as it treads through the desert after "twenty centuries of stony sleep." Millat and company apparently make similar plodding steps to that "rough millennial beast." At the end of Yeats's poem, the speaker describes how the beast is "slouching toward Bethlehem to be born." Likewise, "Millat's Crew were slouching toward Bradford," the English city where they were attending a protest.

Yeats's poem describes a monstrous new world arriving in Europe after the war. The implication in Smith's allusion is that Millat's crew ruptures the status quo in an early attempt to disrupt society. The allusion is also a bit of mockery from the narrator, who ironically compares these young boys trying very hard to seem cool with a highly literary poetic reference.

Cyrano de Bergerac is the title character of a famous 1897 French play by Edmund Rostand. Based on the 17th-century author and military officer of the same name, the play follows Cyrano, a strong-willed and brash hero who is nonetheless often mocked for his over-large nose. Similarly, then, Joshua has been insulted so much for his nerdy proclivities and for his family's eccentricities that he, like Cyrano, perseveres on superior intellect and panache. 

This allusion comes from the narrator, but the self-aggrandizing defensiveness makes it seem like these are Joshua's own internal justifications for how people treat him. This is one of many examples in the novel where the third-person narrator briefly enters into the mind of one of the characters, here ventriloquizing Josh's hurt feelings thanks to Irie's sass.

To these children, cigarettes are the meaning of life, their reason to be. Cigarettes are the very stuff of life, as the narrator compares them to breastmilk ("like babies at teats"). In other words the students desire cigarettes as much as a baby desires its only sustenance in the world. Cigarettes are not only a response to personal hunger but also to cosmic questions, "their answer to the universe." Similarly, the narrator says that cigarettes are "their 42." This is a reference to Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a comic novel in which the last survivor of Earth's extinction explores the universe. In it, a supercomputer called Deep Thought spends seven-and-a-half million years to compute "the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything," and determines the answer to be, indeed, 42. Cigarettes are everything to Glenard Oak students, from a mother's love to the secret of the universe. 

A classmate, Francis Stone, clearly can hardly be bothered to read the sonnet for the class. She reads the first two lines, which reference how "black"—referring to both dark hair and tan skin, though the "Dark Lady" was still Caucasian—has not been included in classical descriptions of beauty. But in the present day, Shakespeare's speaker claims, "now is black beauty's successive heir." A similar description of the Dark Lady's unconventional beauty comes in the next paragraph, where Irie hears another classmate reciting Sonnet 130: "My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun ..." These opening lines depict the poem's muse as having dull-colored features, undercutting common poetic comparisons. (This passage also clarifies that she is White: her breasts are "dun," a dark tan color.) 

Smith introduces these sonnets to elevate Irie's feelings of alienation from her classmates due to her appearance. The sonnets depict a woman whose features were unusual for poetic love interests of her time, yet the speaker still finds her beautiful. But Irie's dark skin and overweight appearance make her feel different from the English people around her, and she feels no one will write her a sonnet to make her feel better about it.

In 1 Corinthians 13:12, Paul writes, "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." Throughout this chapter, Paul is describing how a Christian must be meek and humble and prefer charity to personal gain. And even though understanding others' intentions can be difficult—that is, one can only see others as through a dark pane of glass—one should still maintain these qualities. Paul also implies that "we" only know "part" of God's plan and can only see God and his plan "through a glass, darkly." When a Christian enters God's heavenly presence, that person will "know even as also I am known": one will know God just as God knows that person already. (Note that Dr. Perret references a verse just before this in Corinthians in the flashback in the final chapter.)

Marcus, though, interprets this passage more literally, imagining looking "through a glass, darkly" as using a faulty microscope. He sees history as the story of ever-improving scientific knowledge gained through imperfect observation, resulting in an ever-brighter future. While the biblical passage is usually interpreted as a prompt toward good will toward men and faith in God, Marcus interprets it in the context of the rational progress of science.

Zeno, a Greek philosopher from the fifth century B.C.E., is famous for his observations of apparent paradoxes in the natural world. In his paradox of the arrows, he considers that if motion always takes some time, and if time is made up of a flowing continuum of instantaneous moments, then in any given moment, an object cannot move and can only occupy space, because no time passes inside of a single instant. Thus an arrow shot from a bow cannot move, because it cannot move in any single instant. But arrows in real life clearly can move, resulting in a paradox.

Similarly, the narrator uses the paradox to describe how Millat and Magid cannot move each other in their argument. Just as the arrows are constrained to a physical space equal to themselves in any given moment, the brothers are trapped in their own ideological spaces. To go a step further, they are stuck in the same ideological spaces also argued over by Samad and even Mangal Pande. They continue to have the same arguments over time, yet no time seems to pass, and no movement can take place. 

The narrator continues to unpack Zeno's paradox quite thoroughly after the passage above. This analysis plays off a common interpretation in later Greek philosophy, whereby time is not split into separate instances, but space and time are united into "the One" through which objects can move as normal. This allows the narrator to argue that dividing life into parts (like racial divisions) results in motion and change being impossible. The allusion to the paradox displays how ideological differences prevent progress over time.