http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/05/080505fa_fact_sedaris?currentPage=4
The narrator is initially opposed to smoking, and his voice shows it. At the beginning of the essay, the reader sees him as a boy who thinks of the smoke as "the smell of neglect," instead of his preferred scent of "anticipation." This is an interesting view for anyone to take, much less a person in his early teens. Sedaris uses this unusual viewpoint as a meaningful detail; after reading it early on and connecting with the narrator, the reader is then disappointed on a personal level when the narrator takes up smoking in his early twenties.
In one paragraph, Sedaris uses the sentence's syntax to draw the reader's attention to the narrator's desire to be his own person."The ones I’d smoked earlier had been Ronnie’s—Pall Malls, I think—and though they tasted no better or worse than I thought they would, I felt that in the name of individuality I should find my own brand, something separate. Something me. " Of course, the irony is that he's joining a detrimental habit shared by millions. For the purposes of the essay, however, Sedaris doesn't come right out and say this. Instead, he follows the above line by listing various brands and what 'types' of people typically go for each brand, effectively destroying any sense of individuality through the use of subtle irony.
Sedaris also uses imagery as the narrator describes how wonderful smoking is: "For people like me, people who twitched and jerked and cried out in tiny voices, cigarettes were a godsend." This line gives the reader a sense of a smoker's self- perceived weakness, accompanied by a need to prop himself up on something like a cigarette. I doubt if most readers would feel a sense of empathy after this; speaking for myself, I found the diction and deliberate hyperbole amusing. It gives additional meaning to its paragraph by showing a smoker's dependancy on cigarettes.
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