30 pages • 1 hour read
Bullet in the Brain
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Character Analysis
Anders
Anders is a book critic long soured by his calling and embittered by disappointment with the lack of truly creative, inspiring literary works out for review. He reveals this through his ongoing impatience with the mediocre aesthetics of the things around him—the kitschy tropes of a fresco on a bank ceiling, the banality of conversation between two women waiting in a line, and the cheesy, self-consciously tough-guy demands of bank robbers. At the end of his tether, Anders, giggling, ridicules the robbers until they shoot him. The bullet tears through his brain, triggering an ecstatic memory of his first joyful encounter with the beauty of words, spoken nonchalantly and idiomatically by a boy playing baseball on a summer’s day.
Bank Robbers
Two bank robbers, dressed in business suits and ski masks, take over the bank where Anders stands in line. Both enact the behavior of movie criminals, relying on clichés that particularly gall Anders. One robber, short, plump, and slow, wrangles the guard and then takes his shotgun to the teller windows, where he hands out Hefty bags for the staff to fill with cash. When Anders comments loudly on the robbers’ verbal ineptitude, the second robber, the leader, pokes his pistol into Anders’s gut, then uses it to push Anders’s chin upward to force him to look away from the robbers and toward the ceiling. Anders can’t calm his giggling, and the exasperated robber shoots him.
Two Women in Line
Two women stand just ahead of Anders in the long line at the bank. Their inane chit-chat enrages him. When they complain about a teller who abandons her station despite the crowd of customers, Anders agrees but ridicules the women instead, venting his anger “on the presumptuous crybaby in front of him” (200). When Anders comments caustically on the two robbers, one of the women, terrified and fearing repercussions, “looked at him with drowning eyes […] ‘Please be quiet,’ the woman said” (201-02).
Boys Playing Baseball
In a memory from 40 years earlier, Anders recalls a summer’s afternoon when a group of boys gather to play baseball. They argue idly about the relative merits of professional ballplayers Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle, two of the great baseball center fielders of the mid-20th century. One of the boys brings a cousin from Mississippi who declares that shortstop “is the best position they is” (205); this idiomatic comment enchants Anders.
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