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The text opens with Anders seething in a state of resigned anger as he is stuck on an unmoving line at the bank. His situation is worsened when one of the tellers closes her station, effectively slowing down the process even more. Wolff uses these introductory paragraphs to characterize Anders as a jaded, misanthropic man who is enraged by the predictability and mediocrity of others. For example, in the opening lines, we learn that he is famous for his scathing book reviews. He also insults and belittles the women in front of him, calling their conversation “stupid” in his head and mocking their complaints about the bank teller to their face. That he secretly agrees with them but refuses to do so openly characterizes Anders as a particularly contrary individual.
The robbers’ entrance is the text’s inciting incident, the catalyst that sets the rest of the story’s plot in motion. Here, Wolff increases the suspense by making repeated references to the robbers’ weapons. He also shrouds the robbers in a frightening veil of ambiguity due to their concealed features and lack of names. Everyone in the bank is clearly terrified—the customers and tellers have fallen silent, they are complying with the robbers’ every demand, and the guard is openly praying for his own safety. The only person who appears to be unaffected by the robbery is Anders.
Anders is thoroughly unimpressed with the robbers, and he makes a series of comments to mock their current situation and nitpick the robbers’ language. For example, when one of them threatens the tellers and says that they will be “dead meat” if they push a button to call the police, Anders says, “Oh, bravo… ‘Dead meat’... Great script, eh? The stern, brass-knuckled poetry of the dangerous classes.” Despite the danger, he is unable to stop himself from criticizing the robbers’ lack of originality.
Anders spends much of the rising action making fun of the robbers until one finally notices. The robber approaches Anders and gives him an opportunity to back down, but Anders is unmoved by the robber’s attempts to intimidate him. Anders’ apparent lack of fear might be baffling to the reader. However, Wolff keeps his protagonist at arm’s length narratively speaking; it’s difficult to determine whether Anders has a blatant disregard for his own life or is simply a rude man with no filter.
Anders continues to mock and belittle the robbers until, in the story’s climax, the robber with the pistol shoots Anders in the head. The falling action takes place as time slows down and Anders experiences his final moments alive, reflecting on a previously forgotten childhood memory. Before the reader learns what it is, the narrator lists a series of events that Anders notably does not reflect on as he dies. Some examples include his memories of his first lover, listening to his daughter punish her stuffed animals behind her bedroom door, listening to his professor recite Aeschylus in Greek, hearing about his parents’ broken marriage, and watching a woman commit suicide by jumping from a tall building. These flashes of Anders’s life are essential for a few reasons. First, they offer the reader a glimpse of the man that Anders once was and the live that he’s lived, as part of a series of painful, often mind-numbing events that may have hardened Anders to the world around him. Second, listing these formative memories, memories he doesn’t actually think about in his final moments, adds weight to the memory he does think about. The juxtaposition highlights that memory’s importance, despite the fact that readers might find it somewhat insignificant at first glance.
The memory Anders recalls is of a baseball game that he played as a child. He remembers how his friend Coyle’s visiting cousin asked to play shortstop because it is “the best position they is.” Anders recalls being struck by Coyle’s cousin’s confident disregard for the conventions of grammar, which he found “unexpect[ed]” and “music[al].” The fact that Anders recalls this specific memory in his final moments indicates that it was a foundational experience for him, equally if not more so than some of the other memories the narrator has listed. The reason this memory is so impactful appears to be because he was moved by the power of language, possibly for the first time. His delight serves as a stark contrast to his response to the robbers, whose language he relentlessly mocks. The baseball game is the final piece of the puzzle that explains why Anders behaves the way that he does. He has clearly descended into a life of cynicism, apathy, and misanthropy because he lost his childlike wonder and his ability to be moved by art as he moved through adulthood. The story ends with Anders suspended in the liminal space between life and death as he repeats the phrase “they is” to himself over and over, locked into a memory in which he wasn’t yet the cynical man he will die as.
