Penelope Jankoski
The story utilizes a fragmented narrative that slowly reveals more information the reader, while leaving them isolated and unknowing in many areas. Instead the author, uses readerly devices, such as orientation, to set the reader in the story and allow them to participate with the text in a limited aspect and understand certain aspects of the story, however, many plot points remain vague and mysterious until the last day of reading. The story uses aspects from the natural narrative, while breaking traditional form and telling a story within a story to highlight how storytelling effects our identity and how the stories we tell can become who we are. In this case, L became the story he was telling as an editor of a story he inadvertently became a narrator. The work is telling a story that both breaks from and follows Mary Pratt’s natural narrative of having an “abstract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation, resolution, and coda,” (Pratt, 5). Although all sections of the natural narrative are present, we are only given snippets of each, similar to hint fiction that in a way the reader must piece together the details and fill in the rest that is unknown. The author orients the reader in the initial killing and provides details for that event that contain the complicating action of William shooting his wife and the resolution of William getting away with murder. In fact, the familiar pattern of  a narrative is seen in William's story that he tells. However, as he tells it time nd time again detail seem to change making him seem less and less guilty, first incriminating the group and then his dead wife. The story is initially told comfortably and seems believable but the third version seems coached and fake. In contrast,  fewer details are provided for L’s story and the actions that lead to him committing his crime. In the end, there is a coda in which the actions are explained and the reader is drawn out of the story with the line “and the brain drew the bullet toward it” which is very similar to the title and first thing readers see which is “The Brain drawing the Bullet in”.  By using aspects of a familiar pattern of storytelling, the author is more easily able to effect the reader with his story and shock them with the ending. The narrative also serves as a mode for the editor’s identity to become tarnished and unidentifiable. He retells William’s story with such ease and familiarity that getting it right becomes an obsession, as the story becomes his own.