White Teeth: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Per Alsana’s “instruction” to “look at the thing close up”—the narrator takes the story back to Archie and Samad’s wartime experiences. The two traveled in a five-man Churchill (a kind of tank) through Athens to Thessaloniki in Greece, accompanied by Roy Mackintosh, Will Johnson, and Thomas Dickinson-Smith, their fellow soldiers. Dickinson-Smith is a repressed homosexual who desires Samad, while Roy despises Samad for his “poncey-radio-operator-ways,” mocking him by calling him “Sultan.” Samad says that the term isn’t historically or geographically accurate, since he is from Bengal.

Archie’s brigade was meant to provide service across the army and from country to country—not to fight the war but to ensure that the war “ran smoothly,” and that roads of communication were communicable. Samad tells the other soldiers that he is educated and trained, and that he should be an officer, not a low-level soldier; his great-grandfather Mangal Pande was the “great hero of the Indian Mutiny,” a man who shot the “first hateful pigfat-smeared bullet.” Samad says that now India is full of idiots, and laments that his hand was crippled by a misfired shot in the trenches; since he is disabled, he has ended up in an uncelebrated part of the army that just builds bridges. Roy calls the brigade “the Buggered Battalion,” led by Dickinson-Smith, who has resigned himself to his own fate—to die in battle, like his other male relatives.

The soldiers swap tragic tales about their life: they are a “traveling circus of discontents roaming aimlessly through Eastern Europe.” On May 6, 1945, something in the tank blows up while the brigade is stationed in a town in Bulgaria. Samad and Archie go into town to seek assistance, and when they return, they find Roy, Will Johnson, and Thomas Dickinson-Smith dead; Dickinson-Smith seems to have killed himself before his attacker could. Since Archie and Samad are isolated in Bulgaria, they don’t know that the war has already ended. Samad tries to fix the destroyed tank radio, and Archie attempts to help: the two gradually become better friends.

Samad and Archie interact with some of the town’s children, and they discover that one of them has dollar bills. The boy says that he got them from a man called “Dr. Sick,” who lives in a derelict house in the town. Archie and Samad settle into a routine, eating dinner in the old man Gozan’s kitchen-café every evening; they make a pretense of looking for the killers but soon abandon the mission, deciding to smoke cigarettes and chat outside instead. Their friendship “crosses class and color”: it is “the kind of friendship an Englishman makes on holiday, that he can only make on holiday.” Samad and Archie discuss women, and Samad admits that the woman he will marry—who will eventually turn out to be Alsana—is not yet born. Samad decides to “cement his friendship” with Archie by telling him the epic story of Mangal Pande, his relative. Samad implores Archie to “hold his judgment” if, when he returns to Britain, he hears someone speak of the East.

Samad has started taking morphine left in an abandoned church-turned-hospital in the town, and as he gets high, he reflects on the words left on the church by dissenters who were unwilling to pay a burial tax during a cholera epidemic. These people were locked in the church by a corrupt landlord and left to die. He feels a kinship with these “dead dissenters.” Archie says that if he knew he were going to die, he would spend his last hours “making love to a lady.” Samad tells Archie that they are “creatures of consequence,” and that their children will be born of their actions. He also tells Archie that he considers him his friend, and that they will meet and have dinner together in the year 1975.

In the morning, Samad and Archie are awakened by celebrating Russian soldiers: the war has been over for two weeks. Samad feels furious, since he thought he would have a glorious return to Bangladesh, but he hasn’t accomplished anything in the war. Archie speaks with one of the Russian soldiers, who are on their way to Poland to liberate the work camps; they have stopped in Bulgaria to catch a Nazi hiding in the town named Dr. Marc-Pierre Perret. Perret is a Frenchman who helped the Nazis with their sterilization program and euthanasia policy—he’s also known as Dr. Sick to the town children. Archie, who is wearing Dickinson-Smith’s uniform, is mistaken for a captain, and the Russian soldier asks him if he would like to lead the expedition to hunt down the doctor. Archie is hesitant, but Samad—also disguised as a captain—agrees.

Though Samad is excited to lead the charge on Dr. Perret, Archie is frightened: he has never had a hero, and Samad is the closest thing to one he has ever experienced—though Samad is also a “raving lunatic,” high on morphine and screaming instructions to the drunken Russian soldiers. Later, Archie finds Samad sitting by himself in the dark, upset: he is coming down from a particularly “luscious, eloquent” high, and he believes that with his crippled hand and lack of wartime achievements, he is no longer the man he used to be. Samad tells Archie that he is “fit for nothing now,” and that he doesn’t know what he is going to do after the war. He wonders if he and Archie are effectively deserters—“hiding in a church while the world was falling apart around our ears.” Samad puts his gun into his mouth, and Archie tries to talk him down, telling him that by hunting the Nazi doctor, he has a chance to redeem himself.

The men enter the house on the outskirts of town where Dr. Marc-Pierre Perret lives, and they find a pale, thin man around 25 years old, surrounded by paintings. He has blood-tinged tears rolling down his face, which he tells Samad are the result of “diabetic retinopathy.” The soldiers tell Dr. Sick that he will be brought to Poland to stand trial, and they march him out of the house. Later, they leave the doctor handcuffed to their jeep and go to the town café to drink and play poker. Samad wins easily, and he asks Nikolai Pesotsky, the Russian soldier, to give him Dr. Sick in exchange for all of the things the men have gambled and Samad has won. Nikolai gives Samad the keys to the jeep.

Archie goes with Samad, insisting that they will dump Dr. Marc-Pierre Perret at the first barracks they come across, but Samad wants to kill the doctor. He says that the doctor, a eugenicist, “wants to control; to dictate the future,” but that a “race of indestructible men” is only possible through “faith.” Samad is not particularly religious, but he seizes on religion as a reason to punish Dr. Sick, and he tells Archie that it is his destiny to kill the Nazi. Samad taunts Archie, telling him that he doesn’t “stand for anything.” In response, Archie wrenches the doctor out of the car, and Samad hears a shot ring out a few minutes later. Archie returns to the car bleeding and limping, his face “lit up like a big baby, entering life head first.”