payment page
Anders is a middle-aged book reviewer and the protagonist of "Bullet in the Brain." Anders’s defining characteristics are his cynicism and his misanthropy. In the story’s opening paragraph, the reader learns that Anders is known for the “weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed.” In short, Anders has made a living by critiquing and criticizing other people. The narrator’s overview of Anders’s career complements Anders’s actions throughout the text. In just a handful of pages, Anders criticizes everyone from the two women standing in front of him in line to the bank robbers who enter moments later guns drawn. He internally mocks the women for having a “stupid conversation,” he belittles them when they try to include him even though he agrees with them, and he repeatedly makes fun of the robber’s clichéd language until the man gets overwhelmed and shoots Anders in the head. It’s notable that Anders continues to criticize the robber, despite the clear danger he represents both to Anders and others. It’s also notable that Anders’s first response to the teller being singled out is not concern for her safety, but an opportunity to made a snide remark to the two women who previously scorned her.
Perhaps the most revealing example of Anders’s cynicism, however, occurs towards the middle of the story, when he harshly judges the classical mural that is painted on the bank’s ceiling. Anders feels that the mural is a clichéd representation of moments from Greek mythology. He is particularly scornful of a representation of Zeus and Europa in bull form—he finds Europa’s sensuality crude and Zeus’s predatory gaze cartoonish. Anders’s scorn for the classical mural anticipates the moment towards the end of the story in which the narrator describes a young Anders, whose eyes “burned” with emotion after hearing his professor recite Aeschylus in Greek. Wolff juxtaposes these two very different responses to classical art to illustrate the extent to which Anders has grown too cynical to appreciate a time period that he used to study and venerate. This parallels his response to Coyle’s cousin’s unconventional phrasing (“they is”), a moment that sparked unexpected delight for Anders in his youth. As an adult, however, Anders is merely cynical, compulsively critiquing others instead of reveling in their word choice.
