Jonathan Franzen's essay about cigarette smoking

Despite the fact that dour smoking cut his grandfather's life short and his mother scorned the habit, Franzen took up smoking in college. He compares his affright that she would limit 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 arrest of nicotine addiction. He contends that, because "millions of Americans break off every year" (684), that the smoker who cannot quit is actually however unwilling to suffer withdrawal pains. He writes, "To argue differently is to jettison any lingering notion of personal office" (684). This seems to be a particularly harsh judgment, based or so entirely on Franzen's personal (and unsuccessful) attempts to quit.

He admits that addiction includes a psychological element, a seductive pleasure that makes his final learn of a woman framed in a windowpane smoking a cigarette an indelible picture feature longing, love,

nd recklessness. Yet he seems unwilling to accept that anyone else's experience might be dramatically different from his own. He puts too much stock in the fact of his own personal experience with the subject of his essay.

Franzen contends that the develop in the popularity of smoking became "the herald of the modern, the boon companion of industrial capitalism and high-density urbanism" (678). This is his most interesting and convincing rivalry. Cigarettes went from being a powerful symbol of liberation and independence to being a socially offensive example of personal weakness. Franzen could have expand this point, making it more central to his essay, and advanced his overall argument more efficaciously.

Franzen does better in refuting "the prevailing liberal view that Big Tobacco is Evil with a capital 'E'" (676), demonstrate the ways in which many of the large tobacco companies effectively kept their businesses afloat, in part by continuing to take a public demand for cigarettes "in the decades when the scientific grammatical case against cigarettes was becoming overwhelming" (680). He argues convincingly that the public go along to start smoking and kee
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