“Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff

Hi, this is Lucy Liang.

The character of the protagonist stays very consistent throughout the short story, but the attention and mood of the story does change quite dramatically. In the beginning, Anders is introduced to the readers to be “a book critic known for the weary, elegant savagery” which sets up his character quite well (281). The conversations that Anders had while at the bank, and his reactions to the situation of an armed bank robbery, although a bit bizarre, were not unexpected for whom he is. With his behaviors, I was expecting him to be shot. I even felt like he deserved to be shot for not taking his life and the situation seriously. Then, right in the middle of the story, Anders got shot in the head. This was shocking for me for I was not expecting the main character to die so soon. This is also where the focus and mood shifts. Time is slowed down significantly as the narrator zooms the focus into Anders’ skull, describing the pathway of the bullet, transitioning into a memory “‘passed before his eyes’” (284). The author is very specific with the motion and position of the bullet, and each chain reaction it triggered along the way. The words created a beautiful imagery in my head, imagining “the bullet in the cerebrum set of a crackling chain of ion transports and neurotransmissions” and “the bullet was moving at nine hundred feet per second, a pathetically sluggish, glacial pace compared with the synaptic lightning that flashed around it” (284). I loved the contrast of the slowness of the bullet to synaptic transmissions, and the point focus of the bullet to the spread out web like neuro-pathways. Even though Anders’s death happened in seconds, we got to take a peak at a last and finally happy memory of his, leaving the reader with a lasting impression of “hope and talent and hope” (285).