A Story is a Relationship

"They is..." A phrase familiar to anyone who's taken an American Lit class in the last twenty or thirty years, an idiomatic droplet that catalyzes and determines the vocation and subsequent tragedy of the life of Anders, Tobias Wolff's protagonist in his diamond cut, "Bullet in the Brain." Find a situation that will get your character in trouble--a setting and problem, a locus and opportunity-- that is at odds with the peculiar fashion of their performative behavior. Anders is embittered perhaps, angry, mean, but in a manner that emerges from the application of a  heuristic begot of an innocent and even humble preoccupation. He takes sarcastic jabs at a woman standing in front of him in line at a bank, mocking her complaints that otherwise would draw strangers together in the face of slow, trudging bureaucracy. "A lousy way to treat customers," She defensively summarizes, and he says, "Surely, heaven will take note." He all but delights in making her feel small, though true delight is a mood he is no longer capable of feeling at all. And his whole arc begins with and seeks to celebrate this tiny, fragile sensation.  

I won't trouble you with a summary, only that we learn that Anders is a book critic, a rather spiteful one who's famous for the "elegant savagery" with which he "dispatches" the writers unlucky enough to end up in his cross-hairs. The final line being the equivocal grammatically awkward "they is..." that somehow prefigures this destiny motivated by a tender urge to rediscover the delight in poetry. That the line maintains an existential odour, a sort of Zen koan answer to a riddle that has yet to be asked, is second to the function it plays in respect to the central question of the story: that wonder and delight are a gift that, when commodified, pursued in the manner of an addict always trying to score, always disappointed a little bit that it doesn't meet up with the memory of that first time, will eventually require payment after the fact.