Poem In Tobias Wolf's Bullet In The Brain

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Let it Kill You We live in an unpredictable world, full of astonishing adventures. We are not able to foresee our destiny, and we can not live in the past. Everyone is encouraged to live everyday like it is their last. We are encouraged to find a career that we enjoy so much that “you will never work a day in your life.” In Tobias Wolf’s short story, “Bullet in the Brain”, the main character, Anders, appears to love his job as a book critic. He loves it so much that he continues to critique anything and everything that crosses his mind throughout the day. Anders occupation as a critic, lead him From the moment the narrator describes Anders profession, the tone of the first half of the story is set. The tone is sarcastic and depreciating. …show more content…

The robber refers to Anders as “Bright boy,” and asks him some highly inappropriate questions. The robber was correct, Anders was bright. He had a way with words, a way criticism. That was his life, and that is what put a bullet in his brain. The path of the bullet through Anders brain is very peculiar. Beginning and ending with the cerebral cortex. And the memoires that do not “pass before his eyes” are, again, peculiar. Why doesn’t he remember his wife, or his daughter? Why doesn’t he remember his first lover, Sherry? Or the traumatic scene quote of his mother saying to his father how she “should have stabbed him in his sleep”? These memories are sincere, embarrassing, even frightening. “He did not remember when everything began to remind of something else” (205). Anders final memory brought him back to a time when he wasn’t such a critic. To a time when he was not commenting on the words that people are saying around him, but instead he embraced their words. The narrator takes us back to a warm day on a baseball field for a pick game with some of Anders friends. While discussing who is playing what position, a new boy, Coyle’s cousin from Mississippi, tell them, “Shortstop.. Shorts the best position they is” (205). Anders wanted to hear him say it again. Not to poke fun or make a sarcastic comment, but to embrace those words. Those words were to him, they were unexpected, new, and

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