http://www.afterimagesgallery.com/evansmoking.htm “Man Smoking, Krum, Texas” photograph by Ron Evans.

There also is a deeper level at which we can understand characters in the contemporary short story. Have you ever played the game, "Smoke?" John Gardner, in The Art of Fiction, tells us that beyond knowing the facts about a character's behavior, we grasp what kind of person a character is in a metaphorical way. "Often," says Gardner, " our deepest sense of character comes from symbolic association." As an example of symbolic association, he proposes that we look at the parlor game, "Smoke," which some of us may have played. Gardner writes: "In this game the player who is 'it' thinks of some famous personage living or dead, such as Ghandi or Frank Sinatra, then tells the other players, "I am an Asian," "I am an American," or whatever. The players, in order, try to guess the name of the personage by asking such questions as, "What kind of smoke are you? What kind of weather are you? And so on. The player who is "it" answers not in terms of what the personage might have liked to smoke, or what weather he might have preferred, but what kind of smoke the personage would be if he were incarnated not as a human being but as a certain kind of smoke--cigarette, cigar, pipe, White Owl...As they ask their questions the players develop a powerful sense of the personality they're seeking...it depends on metaphoric intuition...the players discover that the metaphors that describe the personage have a remarkable precision."