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Analysis of James Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on June 12, 2021
As a 20th-century comic writer, James Thurber had few peers. Not only is “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” considered his best story, but the term Walter Mitty also has entered the language as a metaphor for an ordinary man who escapes into a fantasy world of impossible heroics. In this respect Mitty is both universal and American, particularly as critics see his antecedents stretching back to Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer . Mitty is the modern fictional reincarnation of the henpecked husband.
James Thurber/Library of America
The story opens in medias res, that is, in the middle of one of Mitty’s fantasies: He is a naval commander supervising a hydroplane during a raging storm. Mitty is the quintessential officer, worshipped by his crew for his bravery and ability. The reader understands at the same time as Mitty himself does that the scenario takes place only in Mitty’s imagination: He is actually driving a car, and his wife is ordering him to slow down. The rest of the fantasies in the story are similarly triggered by actual events. Mrs. Mitty’s ordering him to wear his gloves leads Mitty to imagine donning surgical gloves as, in the role of an internationally famous surgeon, he prepares to operate on a millionaire banker. In fact, he cannot even park his car properly and must turn it over to a contemptuous youthful parking attendant.
Thurber deftly juxtaposes the ordinariness of Mitty’s life—he is running errands for Mrs. Mitty while she keeps her hairdresser’s appointment—to larger issues of life and death. As a newsboy yells out the headlines of a murder trial, Mitty begins to imagine himself in court, the perfect defendant, only to associate the word cur with the puppy biscuit his wife has asked him to buy. Then, in one of the funniest scenes in the story, Mitty, looking at a copy of Liberty magazine, sees himself as a World War II pilot heroically bombing a German ammunitions plant. Interrupted for the last time by Mrs. Mitty—he has forgotten the puppy biscuit—Mitty imagines himself in front of a firing squad, stoically refusing the blindfold. Although both male and female critics have observed that, in Thurber’s view, American women have won the war between the sexes, it is the uncommon reader who can read this timeless classic of American humor without laughing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Bernstein, Burton. Thurber: A Biography. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975. Holmes, Charles S., ed. Thurber: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Long, Robert Emmet. Thurber. New York: Ungar, 1988. Thurber, James. Vintage Thurber: A Collection of the Best Writings and Drawings. 2 vols. London: Hamilton, 1963.
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The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on James Thurber's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.
Walter Mitty: Introduction
Walter mitty: plot summary, walter mitty: detailed summary & analysis, walter mitty: themes, walter mitty: quotes, walter mitty: characters, walter mitty: symbols, walter mitty: theme wheel, brief biography of james thurber.
Historical Context of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Other books related to the secret life of walter mitty.
- Full Title: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
- When Written: 1939
- Where Written: Connecticut
- When Published: March 18, 1939, in The New Yorker ; collected in My World—and Welcome To It (1942)
- Literary Period: Modernism
- Genre: Short Story/Humor
- Setting: Waterbury, Connecticut, around the winter of 1938-1939
- Climax: Walter Mitty stands before the firing squad in his fantasy
- Antagonist: Mrs. Mitty
- Point of View: Close third person
Extra Credit for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Eighth-Grade Prophecy. As an eighth-grader, Thurber was chosen to write the “class prophecy” for his graduating junior high school class. His prediction reads like one of Walter Mitty’s fantasies: the students go on an adventure in a “Seairoplane” and nearly crash before James Thurber saves the day._
Writing Methods. When he first arrived in New York in 1926, Thurber spent many hours painstakingly perfecting and polishing stories and humor pieces to submit to The New Yorker and other magazines, but his submissions were always rejected. He sold his first piece to the New Yorker after his wife, Althea Adams Thurber, advised him to set an alarm clock for forty-five minutes and submit whatever he had when it rang.
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Compare & Contrast The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber
| (approx. 1 page at 400 words per page) |
1930s: The New Yorker magazine typifies East Coast intellectualism and many popular writers of the day publish stories and articles in it that exemplify an urban sense of sophistication and humor.
1997: Under the editorship of the controversial Tina Brown, the New Yorker struggles to maintain its reputation, yet circulation is up over recent years to 860,000.
1939: The theme of the 1939-40 New York World's Fair is "The World of Tomorrow," which highlights Americans' belief in emerging science and technology as a cure-all.
Today: Forbes magazine reports that in 1994 orthopedic surgeons pay annual malpractice premiums ranging from $33,000 to $117,000. The large number of medical malpractice suits in U.S. courts points to a growing cynicism Americans feel towards medicine and technology.
1940s: During World War II, many women enter jobs vacated by men who have joined the war effort.
Today: Although efforts to pass an Equal Rights...
(read more)
| (approx. 1 page at 400 words per page) |
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Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — The Secret Life of Walter Mitty — Imagination and Reality in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Imagination and Reality in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
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Published: Jun 29, 2018
Words: 761 | Pages: 1.5 | 4 min read
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