A man enters a bank, witnesses an armed robbery, provokes one of the robbers and ends up getting a bullet in the brain. Now there is an interesting plot for you!
             The short story "Bullet in the Brain" was written by Tobias Wolff and was first published in The New Yorker in 1995. The protagonist is a man called Anders. A book critic who has grown extremely tired of his work. But not only has he grown tired of his work, he has actually developed a sort of indifferent attitude towards his surroundings, and a need to criticise everything he sees and hears. First it is the two women standing in the line in front of him. As they all observe the teller leaving her position to go have a chat with one of her male co-workers, the protagonist feels the same resent as the two women, but he still gives the two a hard time the minute they start criticising the teller. This obviously is very double standard but it shows the protagonist's need to criticise. It is as if he has been fed up with more or less moronic plots and overused cliches. When one of the robbers calls Anders "Bright boy!" (p.2 l.56) Anders exclaims "Did you hear that? ... 'Bright boy', right out of 'The Killers'." (p.2 l. 59). He knows his classics, but that is only to be expected from a book critic. Other cliches such as "dead meat", "Capiche" and "my whole life passed before my eyes" downright abhor to him. In fact, when one of the robbers first uses the phrase "dead meat" as he threatens the tellers to stay away from the alarm button, Anders says to the woman in front of him "Great script, eh? The stern, brass-knuckled poetry of the dangerous classes" (p.1 ll.36-37). This quote also shows his feeling of superiority to the" dangerous classes", the blue-collar class, the working class. The fact that his daughter is a professor of economics proves that we are deali...