Bullet In The Brain by Tobias Wolff

Everything is criticized at every level in this story, the people by the main character, the main character by the author and even the story by the author as well. The cruel egoistic personality of Anders is definitely identifiable through these different levels of criticism. I will prove that the inner motivation of this behaviour derives from Anders' egoistic personality which sometimes makes him cruel against others, sometimes against himself. Furthermore, I will prove that whenever Anders criticizes somebody or something he actually tries to punish because of the imperfectness of the object. In order to make the referring to the different part of the story easier I divide it into three parts. The first part ends when the robbers appear at the door of the bank, the second ends when one of the robbers shoots at Anders and the left is the third part.

First of all, if we have a look at the title, Bullet in the Brain, it is about an inanimate thing, the bullet, and not about the feeling of the person who dies because of it, not even the process that leads to this fatal event or the people's reaction to it, no, it only says something in connection with the small piece of metal. The author totally ignores Anders's emotions in the story by giving such a title to his work. We can say he criticises what the main character does and represents. In the first part Anders' critical behaviour is against others, a teller and a crybaby. In the case of the teller, it seems to be obvious to criticise her because of her negligence but Andrers' remarks on the crying baby shows a little bit too strict attitude. The teller is not doing her best to make the customers satisfied so she deserves to be criticized but the little baby is normally unaccountable for crying. Anders would not make a remark on the baby if he considered not only his own but the baby's feeling as well.