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References to Time
"Bullet in the Brain" is filled with references to time. To begin with, the story is bookended with moments in which Anders is suspended in time as he waits for what’s next—the text opens with Anders stuck in line at the bank, and ends with Anders hovering on the brink of death as a bullet tears through his skull. In between these two moments, Wolff plays with the passage of time by summarizing Anders’s life as a series of memories that move fluidly from one to the other. He also manipulates time to expand upon Anders’s final moments. Wolff writes that the bullet enters Anders’s skull and becomes trapped in “brain time,” offering Anders “plenty of leisure to contemplate” the afternoon on the baseball field even though the bullet actually tore through his skull at 900 feet per second and likely killed Anders within a fraction of that time. At the end of the story, Wolff writes that the bullet will still “do its work” and kill Anders at the end—despite the fact that he has finally remembered what used to make him feel happy and fulfilled. Anders’s end is a tragic one; he wasted his precious time on earth feeling cynical and jaded, and he only remembers how to be hopeful and content when it is too late to change anything.
Clichés
Much of Anders’s contempt in the text is directed toward the robbers, and their use of cliché. The use of the phrase “dead meat” he sardonically refers to as the “stern, brass-knuckled poetry of the dangerous classes,” and being told “Capiche?” by the robber with the pistol reduces him to helpless laughter. Even the narrator acknowledges that Anders would have “abhorred” the phrasing utilized to introduce his final memory: the narrator says that it “passed before his eyes,” yet another cliché. It’s made apparent that Anders, critical of everything, is particularly critical of unoriginality. He finds clichés almost offensive, to the point that he initially thinks of the robbery as little more than a scene from a movie, and the robbers themselves as ski mask-wearing, gun-toting caricatures reading from a bad script. He notes with apparent derision that “bright boy,” as he’s referred to by one of the robbers, is a designation straight out of “The Killers” by Ernest Hemingway.
It’s unclear when Anders became so averse to cliché—the narrator notes that Anders “did not remember when everything began to remind him of something else”—but it’s clear he’s always enjoyed the delight of uniqueness. When Coyle’s cousin uses the unconventional phrasing “they is” during their childhood game of baseball, Anders turns the words over in his mind, “elated” by their “pure unexpectedness and their music.”
