• Bullet In The Brain Discussion Questions

This is the first to what I call in my head 'The Commuter Series,' a line of highlighted short stories that hold just as much literary power as a full fledged novel, but can be read while sitting for a midday meal or on the train to work. In a Ted Talk about 'being a better you,' it was questioned why most people who set New Years resolutions, by February have forgotten/given up on the majority of goals. Born in 1945 in Birmingham, Alabama, Wolff lived his adolescent life with his mother in the North Cascade Mountains in Washington State, while his brother and father lived on the East Coast.

Wolff's memoir This Boy's Life (1989) chronicles this early time moving from Seattle to Nehalem, the remote company town in Washington State, and also his mother's later marriage to an abusive husband and step-father.Wolff served in the U.S Army during the Vietnam War era and has several short stories written with those memories as background for his characters. He has a First Class Honors degree in English from Hertford College, Oxford (1972) and an M.A from Stanford University.

In 1975, he was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford.Fiction or non-fiction, Wolff's writing is characterized by an exploration of personal/biographical and existential terrain. Wyatt Mason wrote in the London Review of Books, 'Typically, his protagonists face an acute moral dilemma, unable to reconcile what they know to be true with what they feel to be true. Duplicity is their great failing and Wolff's main theme.' This short short is a concise example of Wolff's provocative style on existential writing. In the length of one commute ride to work, Wolff gives us this seemingly bland, awful character whose later death is essential to understanding the deeper complexities of his early life.Anders's almost outlandish amounts of hatred and disdain for those around him, even for himself and his work, is significant because the one thing that finally gives him satisfaction in an unsatisfying life is his death. Initially, Anders is a flat character who is easy to hate. Shown through the bare minimum of speech, Wolff gives us a man who believes everything he says is important.

It's also significant to note that Anders is a book critic, literally someone who gets paid to be opinionated, his thoughts and criticisms have a price value.So, what comes out of Anders's mouth shows readers his bitter personality. However, in his death-the moment silenced by a bullet to the brain-readers receive full disclosure to the evolution of such a personality.In the most visceral, snapshot kind of way, readers learn the events of Anders's life and why he is the way he is. Through his memories, readers see how Anders's life tempered him into this ill character of savage comments and lack of compassion.

Bullet In The Brain Discussion Questions

Wolff's point was not to make a character well liked, but to make a character well understood. Readers had to be given everything about Anders's life that made him unsatisfied to understand the weight of his final satisfaction with death.And how Bullet in the Brain can completely change the image of a person is because Wolff knew the ins and outs of this character.

He goes through the complex facets of Anders's life and does not omit what Anders 'does not remember' because those memories are the life we as the readers should remember when Anders does not. Through death, literally because of his death, Wolff gives us the major events of Anders's life.In reflection to our own lives, everything significant we do is for the human experience of now. Loving, laughing, and crying, we do it in the present tense of now because we cannot in death. In our ever developing world of ever developing smart technology, our Facebook and our Instagrams immortalize us in pictures we select to showcase.

But from Bullet in the Brain and Wolff's symbology is that the value of our life comes from the reality that we face death. Both life and death give one another meaning and weight, just like good and bad memories-just like all we do not remember to make space for all that we do.

I needed a practical way to keep my life organized and came across the system. Wanting to see if it would work out for me, I researched the web to figure out what is a bullet journal exactly, what’s so popular about it, and if it was worth doing. As a result, I’ve come up with this comprehensive bullet journal for beginners guide, where we’re going to cover a whole lot of stuff to give you a better grasp of bullet journal basics. If you want to get more in-depth, I've also created an with tons more examples. 1. What is a bullet journal?It’s a method to organize your life in a notebook, customized to your likings and lifestyle. It’s a way to take notes, make lists, do brain dumps, track things, create schedules, and much more while also keeping things creative and inspiring.For the more technical history, the concept of bullet journaling is the creative child of founder Ryder Carroll, who wanted to come up with an organization system that could track the past, organize the present, and plan for the future.

How does the bullet journal system work?For a complete newbie, it can be a bit confusing to understand all the parts to this especially with all the pretty layouts posted on Instagram and Pinterest, but once you start taking this up, you’ll get used to the bullet journal system, and hopefully it will be as effective for you as it has been for hundreds of thousands of users around the world. Here’s a short 4-minute clip with a quick overview of the system from the official bullet journal team (via ). When a new period starts, migrate your list.When a new month approaches, take a look at what is still pending from the current/previous month and decide whether or not it should be transferred over to the new month. Ryder intentionally made this a tedious task because the act of writing things down again does two things: 1) commits it to memory better and 2) makes you assess whether or not something is important enough to log again, which essentially makes you more productive because you weed out the unnecessary.Again, mark page numbers and log in your index.This post covers migration on a larger scale (think when you have a new notebook), but understanding the thought process can help you for a smaller scale transfer from month to month. Check out this post on the simple steps how to do this. Start off simple.Yes, it’s easy to get carried away by how pretty that everyone else seemingly makes their bullet journals, but you don’t need to start off that way.

You want a system that works for you, so if you begin to dread it or find that embellishing it with all the pretty colors and doodles takes too much time and therefore makes you less productive, you should rethink the purpose of your journal. Know that you don’t have to do it that way even if Instagram and Pinterest are telling you otherwise!Simple doesn't mean boring. Look at how gorgeous this spread is, and totally doable, right?

Remember, you don’t have to follow everything to a T.Yes, there’s official video on the basics of the bullet journal system, but even so, people have found their own style with bullet journaling. If you find the daily log is not your thing, scratch it and go with weekly spreads instead. That’s the beauty of bullet journaling; it’s totally about YOU and even Ryder would approve of it. In fact, he features other bullet journalists in the official website’s Show and Tell section that delves into the others’ bullet journal processes. It'll really open your eyes to how truly flexible this system is. So make it your own with your fancy or to showcase your personality.Or, if you do want to follow what other people have done, no shame in that either! I mean, that's why I have all these pretty pictures sprinkled throughout this guide.