Unit 5  Section 1Exercise 2 The experience of addiction Smoking
The following are excerpts from Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno, in a chapter entitled “The last cigarette.”(Trans. Berye de Zoete, London, Secker and Warburg, 1962.) The narrator has reached old age without managing to quite smoking. Read the excerpts and answer the discussion questions.
From “The last cigarette,” by Italo Svevo, in Confessions of Zeno
For several weeks I suffered from a violent sore throat accompanied by fever. The doctor ordered me to stay in bed and to give up smoking entirely. I remember being struck by that word entirely, which the fever made more vivid. I saw a great void and no means of resisting the fearful oppression which emptiness always produces.
When the doctor had left, my father, who was smoking a cigar, stayed on a little while to keep me company (my mother had already been dead some years). As he was going away he passed his hand gently over my feverish brow and said:
“No more smoking, mind!”
I was in a state of fearful agitation. I thought: “As it’s so bad for me I won’t smoke any more, but first I must have just one last smoke.” I lit a cigarette and at once all my excitement died down, though the fever seemed to get worse, and with every puff at the cigarette, my tonsils burned as if a firebrand had touched them. I smoked my cigarette solemnly to the end as if I were fulfilling a vow. And though it caused me agony, I smoked many more during that illness. My father would always come and go, always with a cigar in his mouth, and say from time to time:
“Bravo! A few days more of no smoking and you will be cured!”
I am sure a cigarette had a more poignant flavor when it is the last. The others have their own special taste, too, peculiar to them, but it is less poignant. The last has an aroma all its own, bestowed by a sense of victory over oneself and the sure hope of health and strength in the immediate future…Once when I was a student I changed my lodgings, and had to have the walls of my room repapered at my own expense because I had covered them with dates. Probably I left that room just because it had become the tomb of my good resolutions, and I felt it impossible to form any fresh ones there.
I had a partiality for certain dates because their figures went well together. I remember one of last century which seemed as if it must be the final monument to my vice: “Ninth day of the ninth month in the year 1899.” Surely a most significant date! The new century furnished me with other dates equally harmonious: First day of the first month of the year 1901.” Even today I feel that if only that date could repeat itself I should be able to begin a new life.
Study Questions
1. What does it say about a person when he has spent his entire life smoking his ‘last’ cigarette? Given the personality profile of someone who is forever quitting unsuccessfully, what might be some of the barriers to quitting?
2. Compare this passage with the passage by David Sedaris' Quitters
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