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“Anders couldn't get to the bank until just before it closed, so of course the line was
endless and he got stuck behind two women whose loud, stupid conversation put him in a murderous temper. He was never in the best of tempers anyway, Anders—a book critic known for the weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed.”
This is the opening paragraph to "Bullet in the Brain" and it provides key insight into Anders’s character. First, Wolff uses free indirect discourse, a literary device in which a character’s thoughts and feelings are conveyed despite being told by a third-person narrator, to highlight Anders’s rude and jaded thoughts as he judges the women in front of him. Wolff then tells the reader that Anders has a nasty temper which famously fuels his scathing book reviews. These examples combine to create an instant, honest, unflattering look at the story’s protagonist.
“Anders did not remember his wife, whom he had also loved before she exhausted him with her predictability, or his daughter, now a sullen professor of economics at Dartmouth.”
Here, the narrator mentions Anders’s family for the first and only time. Anders’s summation of his wife and daughter is brief, but highly revealing. He has clearly allowed his cynical nature to poison his relationship with his family; his initial interest turned to boredom the longer he spent in their presence. Wolff’s use of the word “now” to describe Anders’s daughter is additionally intriguing because it implies that his daughter used to be a happier, livelier person—just like Anders used to be.
