30 pages • 1 hour read
Bullet in the Brain
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Literary Devices
Direct Characterization
The reader gets a sense of how Anders’s profession as a literary critic infects his attitude during after-hours, distorting his life and mood with animosity and contempt through direct characterization and indirect characterization.
One technique of direct characterization is character action. The story highlights Anders’s anger by describing how he lashes out at those around him. Before the robbery, Anders waits impatiently in a line at a bank, making sarcastic comments about a couple of women waiting ahead of him. Even when he agrees with the women that the teller who abandoned her station at that crowded hour displays callous disregard for her customers, he aims his anger at the women instead.
Another direct characterization technique is dialog. When robbers invade the bank, Anders critiques what they say. No matter the stakes, he cannot escape his bitter reviewing mindset. As he loses all self-control, Anders giggles at the ticklish feeling of the pistol’s barrel jammed into his stomach. Disregarding how disrespected the robber feels, Anders mocks the robber’s unwitting Hemingway quote, “bright boy?” and his corny, overused threat, “Capiche?” (203). As Anders, completely unhinged, erupts in a gale of laughter, the robber shoots him.
A more indirect window into Anders is the litany of memories that he might have recalled at that final moment, which portray a life of frustrated dreams and ruined chances. With that perspective, the reader can now fully understand not only Anders’s reasons for breaking down but why he so appreciates his final memory, a day in his youth when he first began to grasp the beauty of the world and the elegant power of the words that describe it.
Three-Part Structure
The story unfurls in three sections. It begins in a bank, shifts to a flashback of Anders’s life as contained in his memories, then ends at a single, sublime recollection.
The first section includes most of the story’s action. It describes Anders’s frustration as he waits in line at a bank, details the bank robbery that terrorizes the patrons and staff, and shows how the absurdity of the situation causes Anders to erupt in laughter. One robber, insulted, shoots Anders in the head.
At this shocking moment, the tone shifts and the story moves into its second section. Hereafter, what might occur in the bank to the patrons or robbers becomes irrelevant; the story instead now dwells on events inside Anders’s mind. We see literally inside Anders’s head through a quasi-scientific description of the bullet’s destructive path through his brain. We also get a more figurative view of his thoughts through a lengthy set of memories that give brief glimpses into his life.
The story arrives at a third and final section, an elegiac recital of a single, serene recollection that Anders, his consciousness somehow suspended in time, can dwell on at leisure even as his body tumbles to the bank’s floor. He enjoys the luxury of contemplating this memory, which provides him with a cathartic release from his torment.
The author chooses this structure so that the action comes first and Anders experiences lethal peril, which helps the reader to become invested in the protagonist. Then follows the account of his lifetime of disappointments and failures. This sets up Anders’s strange, almost miraculous experience at the end, the final, serenely perfect memory that stands in stark contrast to the failures of his life.
Deus ex Machina
The deus ex machina literary device describes an outside force that alters the plot to benefit the protagonist. Here, the bullet that digs into Anders’s brain literally unearths a perfect memory that eases his passage into death and redeems his cynicism.
The bullet sets off a stream of consciousness episode in which the protagonist relives a moment from his youth. This isn’t the type of stream of consciousness made famous by Jack Kerouac, with his page-long, run-on sentences filled with digressive musings. Instead, it’s a fantasy about a pure, happy memory playing itself over and over, to the unending delight of its beholder.
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