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Even the smallest moments can leave a lasting impact.
The robber with the pistol eventually grows tired of Anders’s snide comments and shoots him in the head. The bullet passes through Anders’s brain and exits behind his right ear. Time slows down as the bullet tears through Anders and he spends his final moments recalling a childhood memory that he had long since forgotten. Before the narrator relays the memory, they list a series of events that Anders notably does not recall as he dies. Some of these moments include memories of his first lover, the poems that he once cherished and memorized in his youth, memories of his wife and daughter, a time when he was moved while listening to his professor recite Aeschylus in Greek, learning of his parents’ abusive marriage, and watching a woman commit suicide by jumping from a tall building. These pieces of Anders’s past are all very different, but they all have one thing in common: they all represent important events in Anders’s life. However, Anders does not focus on any of these defining moments as he dies. Instead, he recalls a random baseball game that he played as a child when he was intrigued and excited by Coyle’s cousin’s unique way of speaking. To Anders, this brief moment of childlike wonder is perhaps the highlight of his depressing and solitary life. Wolff concludes the story with a mournful and nostalgic contemplation of such a tiny memory to suggest that even the smallest moments can have a major impact.
It is important to be empathetic.
Anders is not an empathic man. In the opening paragraph alone, the reader learns that Anders has a “murderous” temper and that he is famous for publishing “savage” book reviews. He is critical of the women in front of him in line at the bank and feels that their conversation is “loud” and “stupid.” He sarcastically remarks that “justice is done” when the bank teller that previously annoyed him is targeted by the robber, apparently sparing no thought for her situation, and he repeatedly mocks the robbers even though it is clear that they pose a serious threat to his safety. Anders’s lack of empathy is even evident in his memories. For example, he finds his daughter “dull” and has fallen out of love with his wife for the same reason. However, the reader learns that Anders used to be a more empathetic, more emotionally available person. To demonstrate this, the narrator describes a moment in which Anders was moved to tears by Aeschylus’s plays, and notes other famous works of literature such as Macbeth by William Shakespeare and “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer” by John Keats that gave him “shivers.” Their words once moved him; by contrast, as an adult, it seems words now only move him to contempt. Similarly, the younger Anders was overjoyed when a college classmate published a novel not long after graduation, and felt respect for the person after reading it. This serves as a stark contrast to the adult Anders, who now reads books for the express purpose of leveling toward them the “weary, elegant savagery” for which he is known. By juxtaposing the younger Anders with the current Anders, Wolff argues that his protagonist is so unhappy because he has substituted malice for empathy and become a generally hardened person as a result. Through Anders, Wolff reminds his readers that empathy is an essential part of the human experience and that it is dangerous to lose sight of it.
Time is relative
Most of "Bullet in the Brain" takes place in real time. Anders is stuck in line at the bank, then he gets into an argument with the two women in front of him, then two robbers enter the bank and order the tellers to fill garbage bags with cash. However, the passage of time becomes complicated once Anders is shot in the head. Wolff writes that the bullet tore through Anders’s cerebrum, which set off a “crackling chain of ion transports and neurotransmissions,” causing Anders to remember a childhood baseball game. The bullet, which is traveling at a speed of 900 feet per second, should have killed Anders instantly. However, Wolff writes that the bullet gets stuck in “brain time,” allowing Anders to reflect on a core childhood memory until the bullet exits Anders’s skull, dragging its “comet's tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce” behind it. Obviously, Anders’s life is not actually elongated and he likely dies within a few seconds. Wolff merely manipulates the conventions of time in the story’s narrative to show that time may be experienced differently—it goes slowly when one is waiting in what feels like an interminable line at the bank, for instance, and the moments before death are also slow, as the brain reacts to the imminent end of the body’s life. Further, time is essential to Anders’s characterization; it has transformed him from a romantic to a cynic, and if he had had more time, the memory of the baseball game may have caused Anders to change his perspective. Tragically, it’s likely Anders doesn’t get this chance, receiving clarity only when it is too late to do anything with it. Wolff notably chooses to end his story with his protagonist suspended in the liminal space between life and death, emphasizing the relative nature of time and perhaps suggesting people should use their time on earth in such a way that their final moments are the celebration of a life well spent and not a tragic glimpse into an innocence and happiness that have since been lost.
