This paper is an analysis of Jonathan Franzen's essay about cigarette smoking, "Sifting the Ashes," which first appeared in New Yorker magazine in 1996 with the subtitle "Confessions of a Conscientious Objector in the Cigarette Wars." Franzen, a smoker who is incredibly ambivalent about his habit, argues that smoking can be seen as a metaphor for the entire 20th century in the way that the habit was first embraced by the American public and then vilified as a conspiracy by the tobacco industry as evil as slavery and the Holocaust. He contends that the truth is much less horrible and much more complicated. His argument is intriguing, controversial, and biased, illuminating the many contradictions involved in lighting and inhaling a small paper cylinder filled with dried tobacco leaves.
Franzen begins by saying, "Cigarettes are the last thing in the world I want to think about" (675), and then proceeds to discuss them for 13 pages. His opening paragraph paints an unappetizing picture of the "filthy habit," which he then counters by admitting that, somehow, he remains unable to stop filling a small saucer with cigarette butts every day, the reminder of a habit he would prefer not to think about.
Despite the fact that heavy smoking cut his grandfather's life short and his mother detested the habit, Franzen took up smoking in college. He compares his fear that she would find out he had been smoking "to a gay man's fear of coming out to his parents" (676), but immediately admits that, while a gay man could not simply choose to be straight in order to avoid exposure, a smoker "could decide tomorrow not to be one anymore" (676).
Franzen has an interesting and surprisingly uncompromising view of nicotine addiction. He contends that, because "millions of Americans quit every year" (684), that the smoker who cannot quit is actually merely unwilling to suffer withdrawal pains. He writes, "To argue otherwise is to jettison any li...