It was dark outside the window, and it was raining quietly in Mao Mao, as if the sky was crying silently. Sitting on the sofa at home, reading Yu Hua's novels, watching a damp.

Things like smoke begin with the illness of 7 and end with the death of 4 and the blind. The whole work is full of unknown smells such as death, impermanence, helplessness and gloom, such as things and people in the smoke. Occasionally, I can see part of it, but I can't see the whole picture, which makes people unable to see through it.

There was a famous tragedy in ancient Greece, King Oedipus, which said that although King Oedipus tried his best to avoid it, he finally failed to escape the "magic sign" of killing his father and marrying his mother, and he completely failed in the struggle with "fate". In the end, he just stabbed himself in the eye as a helpless resistance and surrender to fate. No matter how powerful a person is, he can't escape the innate "destiny", let alone an ordinary person, which should be one of the themes of such things as Smoke. Almost all the plots in the novel illustrate people's helplessness to fate: 7' s illness is due to "conflict" with his son, and the solution can only be to get rid of his son. As a result, "although the original disease of 7 has improved a little, he feels that a new disease is climbing on 7, and this disease is happening."

The most shocking story is the story of the driver and the woman in gray, which seems to be China's version of Oedipus. On the day of the woman in gray's funeral, a wedding joke killed the driver. The arrival of "fate" is so unreasonable that people are so fragile and insignificant when facing it. At the end of the play King Oedipus, the chorus sings: Look, King Oedipus is coming, and his tragic image shows that human beings can't be happy.

Although human beings can do nothing about fate, it is not the most painful. What we can't understand is where the "fate" comes from. It comes from a mysterious and unknown force, which we call "fate" or "heaven". The inevitable "fate" that cannot be avoided actually comes from a kind of loss and accident, and this paradox brings helplessness and cruelty.

All the characters in Smoke have no names and are referred to by numbers. Of course, this is not the laziness of novelists, but intentional. In the face of "fate", no one has any choice, no escape, no exception. This reminds me of two places where people are replaced by numbers: a prison and a hospital. What about the "heaven" that brings "fate" to people? Is there sin in heaven? Who should judge? Is there any medicine for getting sick?