‘A Kind of Shadow’: Mirror Images and Alter Egos in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time

Abstract

Abstract In Swing Time, her newest novel to date, Zadie Smith makes use of a first-person narrator for the first time in her career as a writer, and this change in narrative perspective is crucial to our understanding of the novel. Her narrator is slightly odd and we come to question the veracity of her account. Thus, she is ‘unreliable’ in traditional terms, but this article argues that we can equally call her inauthentic because she obviously represses feelings that are vital to the story. She does not fully expose herself, for she tries to hide the fact that she does not know who she is. Trapped between the intersectionality of race, class, and gender, oppressed by an overbearing mother and a racist society, the narrator has confined herself to an existence as a shadow. By way of Charles Taylor’s politics of recognition and Frantz Fanon’s image in the third person, this article tries to show that Swing Time’s narrator exists only as a shadow because she finds no external affirmation of herself as a black woman.