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“With the line still doubled around the rope, one of the tellers stuck a ‘POSITION CLOSED’ sign in her window and walked to the back of the bank, where she leaned against a desk and began to pass the time with a man shuffling papers. The women in front of Anders broke off their conversation and watched the teller with hatred.”
"Bullet in the Brain" opens with a universally frustrating experience: waiting in an unmoving line at the bank. Anders and the two women in front of him are further enraged when one of the tellers closes her station, which will make the already painful process take even longer. Wolff opens this paragraph with a long, meandering sentence that replicates the tedious monotony that Anders and the rest of the people in line are experiencing.
“She sucked in her cheeks but stared past him and said nothing. Anders saw that the other woman, her friend, was looking in the same direction. And then the tellers stopped what they were doing, and the customers slowly turned, and silence came over the bank. Two men wearing black ski masks and blue business suits were standing to the side of the door. One of them had a pistol pressed against the guard's neck. The guard's eyes were closed, and his lips were moving. The other man had a sawed-off shotgun.”
This quote describes the moment the people in the bank realize that a robbery is about to take place. Wolff describes the fearful atmosphere, characterized by silence, people stopping what they are doing, and everyone staring at the same spot, before revealing what these characters are so afraid of to increase suspense and generate an ominous tone. He uses this abrupt tonal shift to transform the short story’s previously benign setting (a simple bank with a long line) into something far more ominous, a change that Anders alone doesn’t immediately grasp as he mocks the robbers.
“This is what he remembered. Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whirr of insects, himself leaning against a tree as the boys of the neighborhood gather for a pickup game. He looks on as the others argue the relative genius of Mantle and Mays. They have been worrying this subject all summer, and it has become tedious to Anders: an oppression, like the heat.”
Here, Anders remembers the setting of a formative childhood memory. Wolff indicates that this memory is more important than all of the others previously listed, as it is the only memory that is described in vivid detail and the only one Anders actually recalls here, at the end of his life. Wolff uses descriptive and sensory language to transport the reader, like Anders himself, to the very baseball field where he experienced a sense of unexpected delight as a result of the power of language.
