ENG1102 Troy University Bullet in the Brain Fiction Analysis Read the “Bullet in the Brain” (BL 72-76) Write a short essay (750 words) that defends a thes

ENG1102 Troy University Bullet in the Brain Fiction Analysis Read the “Bullet in the Brain” (BL 72-76)

Write a short essay (750 words) that defends a thesis you developed through a close critical reading/analysis of one (or two) of the works of fiction we’ve read in Weeks 1-2. The “critical response” essay relies on textual support from the primary text (secondary sources are not required) – not plot summary to develop your argument. Do not confuse “critical analysis” with “plot summary”: the goal is to develop, sustain, and advance a thesis based on a critique of the primary text.

What you’ll be graded upon:

Introduction: You establish a context for the significance of your thesis in regards to the literary work as a whole. How does your argument contribute to understanding the author’s major literary/thematic concerns? What can other readers learn from your analysis?
Thesis: You state your main point (or argument) in 1-2 sentences. The thesis is the culmination of your introduction.
Organization. Your essay should follow that of a typical literary critique: Since your focus must be on analyzing some literary motif, theme, or a combination of literary elements (such as symbolism, character, setting, etc.), your essay must contain well-structured supporting paragraphs that contain a topic sentence, quotes from the primary text (secondary sources are not required), an explanation/discussion of the significance of the quotes you use in relation to your thesis, and a concluding sentence or two that situates the entire paragraph in relation to the thesis. Your thesis will focus on some kind of critical analysis of the primary text, so your supporting paragraphs should be organized around each of the quotes you use, explaining the significance of the quotes and why (or how) they illustrate your main point, but you also need to make sure that your paragraphs contain strong transitions and at least six (or more) sentences.
Conclusion: Regardless of the argument you make, you want a conclusion that avoids summarizing what you’ve just said, and please avoid writing, “In conclusion.…” Your aim in a conclusion is to place the discussion in a larger context. For example, how might your critical analysis of a literary character relate to the other characters in a work? How might your thesis be applied to other aspects of the text, say for example, setting or symbolism?
Grammar and mechanics: Your paper avoids basic grammar mistakes, such as dropped apostrophes in possessives, subject/verb disagreement, arbitrary tense switches, etc. The paper demonstrates a commitment to proofreading by avoiding easy-to-catch typos and word mistakes (effect for affect, for example). The paper adheres to MLA formatting style for in-text citations.
Presentation: Your paper meets the minimum length criteria of 750 words, is typed with a title and your name on it. Your paper must be fully double-spaced throughout to allow room for my comments and editing or the paper will be returned ungraded. Tobias Wolff
Chapter 3 • Character
72
6.
7.
8.
9.
the fact that these persons are not clearly labeled and identified a failure on the
author’s part?
What is stream of consciousness?WO,uldyou call ”The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” a stream-oE-consciousnessstory?’Refer to the story in your reply.
Sum up the character of the daughter Cornelia.
Why doesn’t Granny’s last child, Hapsy, come to her mother’s deathbed?
Would you call the character of Doctor Harry “flat” o~”r~l!nd”?Why ishis flatness
(or roundness) appropriate to the storv?
. ”
How is this the story of another “jilting”? What similarities are there between that
fateful day sixty years ago (described in paragraphs 29, 49, and 61) and the moment when Granny isdving?This time, who is the “bridegroom” not in the house?
“This is the story of an eighty-year-old woman lying in bed, getting groggy,and dying. I can’t see why it should interest anybody.” How would you answer this critic?
t
10.
11.
Tobias Wolff
_—-,,—–
.
.~._.~;……_.__
1997
Bullet in the Brain
Tobias Wolff was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in
1945, the son of an aerospace engineer and a waitress and secretary. Following his parents’ divorce,
Tobias moved with his mother to Washington State
while his older brother, Gdoff}ey, remained with
their father (a pathological liar who ~as the ~ubject
of Geoffrey Wolff’s qcclaimed memoi~ The Duke
of Deception). Tobias Wolff’s own memoir, This
Boy’s Life (1989), describes, am.ong ~ther things,
his tense relationship with his abusive stepfather;
it was the basis for the 1993 film starring f?_obert
De Niro and Leon£rdo DiCaprio. In 1964 Wolff .
joined’ the army, where he spent four years, including a year in Vietnam as a
Special Forces language expert. This experience is recounted in a second mernair, In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War (1994). After his military service, he earned a bachelor’s degree at Oxford University and a master’s
at Stanford Uni~ersity, where he currently teaches in the creative writing program. W.olff is the author of six volumes of fiction: the,n09)ella The Barracks
Thief (1984, PEN/Faulkner Award), the novel Old School (2003), and four
volumes of short stories, mast recently Our Story Begins: New and, Selected
Stories (2008),
Acknowledging Raymond Carver (his onetime faculty colleague at Syracuse
University) and Fldnnery O’Connor as influences, Wolff writes stories that, in
the words of one critic, create a “sometimes comic, always compassionate world of
ordinary people who suffer twentieth-century martyrdoms of growing up: wowing
old, lo~ing and lacking love, living with’parents and lovers and wives and their own
weaknesses.” Wolff lives in Northern California.
73
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.
With the line still doubled around the rope, one of the bank tellers
stuck a “POSITION CLOSED” sign in her window and walked to the back of
the bank, where she leaned against a desk and begah 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. “Oh, that’s nice,” one
of them said. She turned to Anders and added, confident of his accord,
“One of those little human touches that keep us coming back for more.”
Anders had conceived his own towering hatred of the teller, but he immediately turned it on the presumptuous crybaby in front of him. “Damned
unfair,” he said, “Tragic, really. If they’re not chopping off the wrong leg, or .
bombing your ancestral village, they’re closing their positions.”
She stood her ground. “I didn’t say it was tragic,” she said, “I just
think it’s a pretty lousy way to treat your customers.”
“Unforgivable,” Anders said, “Heaven will take note.”
.5
She sucked in her cheeks but istared 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 man 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. “Keep your big mouth shut!” the man with the pistol
said, though no one had spoken a word. “One of you tellers hits the alarm,
you’re all dead meat. Got it?”
The tellers nodded.
“Oh, bravo,” Anders said .. “Dead meat.” He turned to the woman in
front of-him. ‘,’Great script, eh? The; stern, brass-knuckled poetry of the
dangerous classes.”
She looked at him with drowning eyes.
The man with the shotgun pushed the guard to his knees. He handed
10
the shotgun to his partner and yanked the guard’s wrists up behind -his
hack and locked them together with a pair of handcuffs. He toppled him
onto the floor with a kick between the shoulder blades. Then he took his
shotgun back and went over to the security gate at the end of the counter.
l le was short and heavy and moved with peculiar slowness, even torpor.
“Buzz him in,” his partner said. The man with the shotgun opened the
gnte and sauntered along the line of tellers, handing each of them a Hefty
hag. Whe!). he came to the empty position he looked over at the man with
t he pistol, who said, “Whose slot is that?”
Tobias Wolff
74
75
Chapter 3 • Character
Anders
to the man
“Then
“There
watched the teller. She put her hand to her throat and turned
she’d been talking to. He nodded. “Mine,” she said.
get your ugly ass in gear and fill that bag.”
you go,” Anders said to the woman in front of him. “Justice
is done.”
“Hey! Bright boy! Did I tell you to talk?”
“No,” Anders said.
“Then shut your trap.”
“Did you hear that?” Anders said. “‘Bright boy.’ Right out of ‘The
15
Killers.”‘o
“Please be quiet,” the woman said.
“Hey, you deaf or what?” The man with the pistol walked over to Anders. He poked the weapon into Anders’ gut. “You think I’m playing games?”
“No,” Anders said, but the barrel tickled like a stiff finger and he had
to fight back the titters. He did this by making himself stare into the man’s
eyes, which were clearly visible behind the holes in the mask: pale blue
and rawly red-rimmed. The man’s left eyelid kept twitching. He breathed
out a piercing, ammoniac smell that shocked Anders more than anything
that had happened, and he was beginning to develop a sense of unease
when the man prodded him again with the pistol.
“You like me, bright boy!” he said. “You want to suck my dick!”
20
“No,” Anders said.
“Then stop looking at me.”
Anders fixed his gaze on the man’s shiny wing-tip shoes.
“Not down there. Up there.” He stuck the pistol under Anders’ chin
and pushed it upwards until Anders was looking at the ceiling.
Anders had never paid much attention to that part of the bank, a
pompous old building With marble floors and counters and pillars, and gilt
scrollwork over the tellers’ cages. The domed ceiling had been decorated
with mythological figures whose fleshy, toga-draped ugliness Anders had
taken in at a glance years earlier and afterward declined to notice. Now he
had no choice but to scrutinize the painter’s work. It was even worse than
he remembered, and all of it executed with the utmost gravity. The artist
had a few tricks up his sleeve and used them again and again-a certain
rosy blush on the underside of the clouds, a coy backwards glance on the
faces of the cupids and fauns. The ceiling was crowded with various dramas,
but the one that caught Anders’ eye was Zeus and Europa-portrayed,
in
this rendition, as’ a bull ogling a cow from behind a haystack. To make
the cow sexy, the painter had canted her hips suggestively and given her
long, droopy eyelashes through which she gazed back at the bull with sultry
“The Killers”: a short story by Ernest Hemingway about twO gangsters who visit a suburban
Chicago diner in search of a prizefighter they have been told to murder. They use the term
“bright boy” to condescendingly and aggressively address the other men in the diner.
25
welcome. The bull wore a smirk and his eyebrows were arched. If there’d
been a bubble coming out of his mouth, it would have said, “Hubba hubba.”
“What’s so funny, bright boy?”
“Nothing.”
“You think I’m comical? You think I’m some kind of clown?”
“No.”
“Fuck with me again, you’re history. Capiche?”
Anders burst out laughing. He covered his mouth with both hands
and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” then snorted helplessly through his fingers
and said, “Capiche-oh,
God–capiche,” and at that the man with the
pistol raised the pistol and shot Anders right in the head.
The bullet smashed Anders’ skull and ploughed through his brain
and exited behind his right ear, scattering shards of bone into the cerebral
cortex, the corpus callosum, back toward the basal ganglia, and down
into the thalamus. But before all this occurred, the first appearance of
the bullet in the cerebrum set off a crackling chain of iron transports and
neuro-transmissions. Because of their peculiar origin these traced a peculiar pattern, flukishly calling into life a summer afternoon some forty years
past, and long since lost to memory. After striking the cranium the bullet
was moving at 900 feet per second, a- pathetically sluggish, glacial pace
compared to the synaptic lightning that flashed around it. Once in the
brain, that is, the bullet ‘came under the mediation of brain time, which
gave Anders plenty of leisure to contemplate the scene that, in a phrase
he would have abhorred, “passed before his eyes.”
It is worth noting what Anders did not remember, given what he did
remember. He did not remember his first lover, Sherry, or what he had
most madly loved about her, before it came to irritate him-her
unembarrassed carnality, and especially the cordial way she had with his unit,
which she called Mr. Mole, as in, “Uh-oh, looks like Mr. Mole wants
to play,” and, “let’s hide Mr. Mole!” 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, He did
not remember standing just outside his daughter’s door as she lectured her
hear about his naughtiness and described the truly appalling punishment
Paws would receive unless he changed his ways. He did not remember
a single line of the hundreds of poems he committed to memory in his
youth so that he could give himself the shivers at will-not “Silent, upon
a peak in Darien,” or “My God, I heard this day,” or “All my pretty ones?
1)id you say all? 0 hell-kite! All?” None of these did he remember; not
nne. Anders did not remember his dying mother saying of his father, “t
hould have stabbed him in his sleep.”
He did not remember Professor Josephs telling his class how Athenl:1II prisoners in Sicily had been released if they could recite Aeschylus,
lid then reciting Aeschylus himself, right there, in the Greek. Anders
30
35
76
AliceWalker
Chapter 3 • Character
did not remember how his eyes had burned at those sounds. He did not
remember the surprise of seeing ‘a college classmate’s name on the jacket
of a novel not long after they graduated, or the respect he had felt after
reading the book. He did not remember the pleasure of giving respect.
Nor did Anders remember seeing a woman leap to her death from the
building opposite his own just days after his daughter was born. He did
not remember shouting, “Lord have mercy!” He did not remember deliberately crashing his father’s car into a tree, or having his ribs kicked in by
three policemen at an anti-war rally, or waking himself up with laughter.
He did not remember when he began to regard the heap of books on his
desk with boredom and dread, or when he grew angry at writers for writing them. He did not remember when everything began to remind him
of something else.
This is what Anders 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.
Then the last two boys arrive, Coyle and a cousin of his from Mississippi. Anders has never met Coyle’s cousin before and will never see
him again. He says hi with therest but takes no further notice of him
until they’ve chosen sides and someone asks the cousin what position he
wants to play. “Shortstop,” the boy says. “Short’s the best position they is.”
Anders turns and looks at him. He wants to hear Coyle’s cousin repeat
what he’s just said, but he knows better than to ask. The others will think
he’s being-a jerk, ragging the kid for his grammar. But that isn’t it, not’ at
all-it’s that Anders is strangely roused; elated, by those final two words,
their pure unexpectedness and their music . He takes-the field in a trance,
repeating them to himself.
”
‘
The bullet is already in the brain; it won’t be outrun forever, or charmed
to a halt. In the end it will do’ its work and leave the troubled skull behind,
dragging its comet’s tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the
marble hall of commerce. That can’t be helped. But for now Anders can
still make time. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for
the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy iniright field to
smack his sweat-blackened mitt and softly chant, They is, They is, They is.
77
4. Who in the story would you say is a stock character?
5. Why did Wolff decide to tell us what Anders did not remember?
6. What is the significance of the afternoon that Anders does remember? What do
the final words, They is, symbolize for him?
7. How has Anders changed during the course of his life?
Alice Wa’lker
,
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Everyday Use.
,!
Questions
1. Describe the character of the adult Anders. Why do you think Wolff chose to
make him a book critic?
2. Does Anders seem to experience the robbery as a real-life event? In what ways is
his reaction different than the other customers, and why do you suppose that is?
3. Is there anything symbolic about setting the story in a “marble hall of commerce,”
especially in contrast to the baseball field conjured up in his memory?
I
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1973
Alice Walker, a leading black
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