Bullet in the Brain

6) Anders is not a sympathetic character from the exposition to the climax. Does your sense of him shift over the rest of the story? Does he become more sympathetic to you? If yes, account for this.

Right off the bat, Anders appears to be somewhat of a cocky, sarcastic guy who has no problem with everyone knowing that he is this way. For instance, in the conversation in line with the random woman who he has likely never talked to in his life, he blatantly comes out with a wave of sarcasm and kind of ridicules the woman's comment about the tellers closing their positions. He isn't making fun of this woman's concern out of anger because of the inconvenience it's causing him, but rather he is simply just being a dick because that's how he is.

As the story progresses, my sense of him definitely shifts because before the robbery commences, my perception of the guy is that he is an asshole with whom I would never want to have a conversation. However, once the robbery kicks off I found myself kind of liking the guy because of how he viewed the entire situation. The expected layman reaction to being in a bank during a stick-up is panic and extreme concern for making it out alive. Anders takes in the whole situation as a big joke from the start and actually makes it known to everyone in the bank, especially the masked man with the gun to his head. When he is told to look at the ceiling, his apathy for the gravity of the situation is portrayed through his analysis of the artwork on the ceiling. So I would say that at this point, I took a small liking to his character because I've always enjoyed the characters who have the confidence to downplay a critical moment that could potentially end his or her life.

Once the robber finally gets fed up and pulls the trigger, Anders' character begins its transition into a more sympathetic one in my mind. However, he is not sympathetic for all the reasons that the typical character would be in a moment-of-death literary description. Rather, he becomes sympathetic to me in the sense that what "flashes before his eyes" as he is dying is the baseball field and Coyle's cousins grammatical error, which are two things that he apparently has a lot of love for. The typical character would think about his family and everything that a human being would conventionally remember loving. Wolff mentions all of those things but for the sole purpose of showing the reader what Anders doesn't remember. While this technique portrays Anders' character as a heartless, apathetic human being, his "soft side" is brought back around in the memory of the sandlot, the heat, and the misuse of language which he apparently loved to think about on a regular basis.