White Teeth: Style 1 key example

While many of these are folded smoothly into the text (like the reference to the Hitchhiker's Guide in Chapter 7), the narrator also often uses such references to break the flow of narration and begin explaining the relevance of the connection directly to the reader. A good example of this is in the reference to Zeno's paradox of the arrows in Chapter 17. The narrator compares Millat and Magid's stalemate argument to Zeno's arrows— arrows that seemingly cannot possibly move because time is separated into distinct instances, during which no motion can take place. This would be a reasonable allusion on its own, but the narrator proceeds to explain its relevance in great detail for multiple pages. While other novels with such exuberant narrators use densely packed allusions to confuse the reader, White Teeth's idiosyncratic style attempts to teach the reader directly.

The novel, as alluded to above, features an omniscient third-person narrator. The narrator is often metafictional, informing the reader of the progression of the story and questioning the value of their own narrative. The narrator also makes widespread use of free indirect discourse, a technique pioneered by Virginia Woolf in which a third-person narrator briefly enters into the mind of a certain character, often without warning or announcement. For instance, for the first several pages of Chapter 20, the narrator seems to speak with Archie's voice as he attends the Futuremouse presentation. Free indirect discourse allows the narrator to reveal different characters' internal feelings. Thus this style fits with the novel's plot, which concerns the complicated, overlapping relationships between many characters from various families.