Third Person Narration In John Steinbeck's White Teeth

Earlier in the same chapter she reads -without permission- Magids and Marcus Chalfens correspondence, like she has been doing lately. They normally speak about their experiments, studies and the development their ideas will bring to the world, but in one of them Marcus speaks about Irie, and not to her delight. Marcus means no harm, and in fact he seems to hope a good future for Irie, but he only sees her as bright and sharp -although not enough to be and investigator, or even a doctor-, and as the owner of two big breasts. He thinks that she can aim to be a dentist and, as ironical as it may seem, she quite likes the idea.

As much as its obvious that the Chalfens influence her deeply, that two teeth bite and its significance makes her really

In White Teeth we have a third person omniscient narrator, so we see as much as he/she wants to tell us. But this is not an omniscient narrator that only tells us what happens, he/she also shares his/her opinions on some characters and matters, and he/she often does in a caustic way. It's like the narrator was Zadie Smith herself shedding light on her own creation, although sometimes this third person narrator point of view barrier gets difuminated and let's us

In fact, its narrative mode is the first thing that captures the attention of the reader. Which type of narrator do we have? A third person one? Yes, there is a third person narrator. But there are also a lot of first person narrators, one for every character with a dedicated point of view in the story. This may sound different, but there are a lot of books in which we share the characters eyes. What is not usual is having all these points of view mixed in the same chapter, changed constantly and abruptly and even with glimpses of not only that third person narrator, but also the point of view of a dog. This dog, called Dog, makes an strange appearance in the story: we can read its toughs before both we and the characters know about its existence, and eventually those chaotic messages feel quite natural in the