| Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Andrea Levy’s Small Island, representative works of British postwar second-generation immigration novels, have attracted much attention since their publication, win several literary awards successively, and receive favorable receptions in both the market and critical field. As two up-rising stars in British literary circle at the turn of the twenty-first century, Smith and Levy focus their work on the multicultural British society. In White Teeth, Smith depicts two London families with multicultural backgrounds at the end of the20th century:family of Pakistani veteran Samad Iqbal and that of British veteran Archie Jones. Through their shared memory of the Second World War, Samad and Archie become best friends and this war experience has profound influence on their postwar life. They cannot fit into reality and try to search for the sense of existence through their war memory and are thus viewed as abnormal. Set in wartime and postwar London and Jamaica, the plot of Small Island is mainly developed around four characters: Hortense Roberts, Gilbert Joseph, Queenie Buxton, and Bernard Bligh. Through the description of their experience in the war and postwar period from their own perspectives, the novel depicts the psychological change of Jamaicans towards their "mother country" Britain and the trauma war brings to both Jamaicans and the British. Among contemporary British novels by immigrant writers, White Teeth and Small Island are the two that invest most attention to the Second World War. Previous criticism of these two works mainly takes a postcolonial perspective and focuses on topics like identity formation, multiculturalism, historical trauma of immigrants, and narrative technique, while the plot concerning the Second World War is so far less covered.As a discourse, stories have the power of participating in ideology formation and then changing people’s perception of the world. Through retelling the history of the Second World War from the perspectives of different characters, White Teeth and Small Island search for and excavate the voices excluded from the official history and give voices to the marginalized colonial "Other" and ordinary British people. These voices form a contrast with the dominant discourse and constitute a counter-discourse. The interaction of these two discourses establishes a dynamic historical "discursive field", which displays the complexity and heterogeneity of history. Behind the history rewriting is a kind of identity anxiety that aims at appealing to history revaluation and reconsidering the relation between history and reality, Self and Other.The thesis mainly consists of four chapters. Chapter One is an overview of British official history of the Second World War as recorded in historical books, providing background for the whole thesis. Chapter Two is a detailed analysis of the war plot in White Teeth. The characters are classified mainly by race. In addition, an interpretation of the Mangal Pande case is provided to illustrate Smith’s view on historical writing. Chapter Three is a textual analysis of the war plot in Small Island with the same classification method of characters applied in Chapter Two. The last chapter is a comparison of White Teeth and Small Island and a revelation of the implications behind the writers’historical rewriting. |
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