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Chapter 19
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in White Teeth, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Family Ties
Race, Racism, and Multiculturalism
Female Independence
The Influence of History
Summary
Analysis
Archie thinks that the room is “very modern,” just like on TV, though it is full of people he knows: Millat, Josh Chalfen, Marcus. Marcus is sitting next to four other men, three his age and one older. There is also a mouse scurrying around in a glass box with airholes, prominently displayed. Abdul-Mickey sits down next to Archie, and the two talk about “Science”: Mickey says that at the end of the day, science has “got to please the people,” and that there isn’t much of a difference between a place like this conference room and Mickey’s café. He is convinced that the FutureMouse experiment might help to cure his skin condition.
Mickey realizes that the FutureMouse conference room is not so different from O’Connell’s, since both places are designed to “please the people”—to offer them a space that might help them to improve their lives (since Marcus believes his genetic experimentation holds the keys for solving many diseases). Once again, the same narrative seems to be playing out across different settings and different times.
Themes
Joshua and the FATE members are seated in the middle of the crowd, which will make it difficult for them to carry out their plan. Crispin is supposed to pretend to hold Josh hostage in order to get Marcus to surrender the FutureMouse, though Josh realizes that Crispin has “underestimated the power of Chalfenism”: he thinks that his father might not choose to save him.
Joshua finally realizes that his family ties run deep: though he does not fully approve of “Chalfenism,” he understands it to be a part of his own identity, and he understands his father far better than FATE seems to (realizing that Marcus may not back down on the FutureMouse project, even if his own son is held hostage).
Themes
Millat believes himself to be a “Pandy” deep down: “there’s mutiny in his blood.” He has procured a gun, though now that he is here, he feels scared to use it: he remembers Al Pacino in the first Godfather movie, huddled in a bathroom (“as Pande was huddled in the barracks room”) before deciding to “blast the hell out of” his opponents.
Millat wants to change the course of history by refusing to make the same mistakes that Pande did, though ultimately, he will be foiled, just like his ancestor—he will not be able to fire the “heroic,” mutinous shot that he decides to take.
Themes
Irie has asked her unborn child to “offer some kind of a sign” to figure out who his or her father is, but she hasn’t received anything: “Irie’s child can never be mapped exactly nor spoken of with any certainty.” Irie imagines a time sometime soon “where roots won’t matter anymore because they can’t.”
Irie hopes to move away from the past and toward a future where the past does not exercise as much control over events; ironically, however, the past is about to reemerge dramatically.
Themes
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Meanwhile, Hortense, positioned outside of the Institute, has begun to sing hymns. Archie sends Samad out to see Hortense, who is standing with Ryan Topps and other Witness ladies, passing out copies of the Watchtower (Witness literature). Samad approaches Hortense, who is holding a banner reading, “THE TIME IS AT HAND.” Samad tries to ask her if she can be quieter, but he gives up, “partly because he is tired,” “partly because he is old,” but mostly because he understands the desire to “seek.”
Though Samad has railed against Western culture for much of the novel, he feels a connection with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who, like him, seem to be “seeking” answers to questions that seem unanswerable—about the meaning of life, the power of God and faith, and the fate of the world.
Themes
Back in the room, Marcus Chalfen begins to introduce his mentor, one of the men seated next to him. Archie wonders who his own mentor is, and he settles on Samad, since he can’t imagine making decisions without him. Marcus names his mentor as “Dr. Marc-Pierre Perret,” and Archie recognizes the name faintly. He sees Millat looking uneasy in the crowd, and he notices that Dr. Perret, seated next to Marcus, is weeping “tiny tears of pride”—red tears. Samad reenters the room and recognizes the doctor; suddenly, he realizes that Archie has lied to him for 50. He turns to Archie and begins to curse in the Bengali vernacular.
Millat is “reaching like Pande” for his gun, and Archie stands up. With no coin to help him, he runs forward, placing himself “between Millat Iqbal’s decision and his target, like the moment between thought and speech.” In a flashback, Archie and Dr. Perret are walking through the flatlands; Archie has been tasked with killing the doctor. Archie begins to feel sorry for Dr. Perret, and he offers him a cigarette as a last request. Dr. Perret tries to reason with Archie, telling him that if he kills him, the decision will be “repeated again and again, through eternity.” Archie decides to flip a coin: if it is heads, he will kill the doctor, and if it is tails, he will spare him. The coin falls behind him, and as he bends to pick it up, the doctor shoots him in the thigh. He turns around and shows the doctor the coin, which has landed on tails. Back in the present, Archie takes the bullet from Millat’s gun in the thigh and falls down through the mouse’s glass display box.
Archie spares Dr. Perret’s life for the second time, repeating history: at the same time, Millat repeats history by failing to fire a “heroic” shot, like Mangal Pande (Millat believes the act is heroic because he is aiming at Marcus Chalfen). Dr. Perret’s words to Archie in the past—though clearly a desperate attempt to survive—seem to hold true, since Archie’s decision not to kill Dr. Perret is also repeated “again and again,” through history.
Themes
The narrator then takes over the story, saying that this end is “simply the beginning of an even longer story” that “the same focus group who picked out the color of this room” will probably want to see played out. Eyewitnesses were unable to identify the culprit of the shooting at the Institute as either Magid or Millat, so both are given community service, working as gardeners in Joyce’s new project, a huge millennial park by the banks of the Thames. Some people, especially young women, might want to know about Irie, Joshua, and Hortense, who are sitting by a Caribbean sea in 2000: Joshua and Irie are lovers, and Irie’s daughter writes postcards to her “uncles,” Millat and Magid. Meanwhile, on December 31, 1999, Samad, Archie, Alsana, and Clara are playing blackjack in O’Connell’s, which has finally opened its doors to women; the narrator says that it is “largely the criminal class and the elderly” who find themselves interested in this part of the story.
The narrator concludes the story by framing the characters’ narratives in terms of the “focus groups” most interested in them. Though the narrator sorts out and separates the identity groups who would like to see the different characters’ stories played out, the Iqbal, Jones, and Chalfen families have all intermingled, suggesting that contemporary British society is not easily divided into discrete demographic categories. Ultimately, the novel advances a cautiously optimistic image of racial harmony, showing the families at peace—despite their many differences and complicated cultural backgrounds.
Themes
The narrator concludes by saying that telling these concluding tales would be to “speed the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect,” which Archie knows isn’t true. Back in the present, some onlookers are watching Archie bleeding on the FutureMouse cage, while others are watching the small brown mouse run away from the scene. Archie, too, watches the mouse, thinking, “Go on my son!”
