The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Loren Martin
Sahag Gureghian
Eng 125
16 September 2013

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Throughout this class, I’ve been stretched further mentally than I have in a long time. I am not a naturally a person who sits and reads poems or tries to see if there is symbolism being used in a short story. For me, I take life the same way I do what I read, at face value. If you talk to me about June, I will take you literally, like you’re talking about the month of June. I won’t get that your symbolizing an establishment. So I guess that even though literature is very frustrating to me, I think maybe I’ve learned a few things.
One of the things that we looked at in this class was themes in literature. What themes are, and how they may or may not flow through poems or short stories. I am going to take a look at two very different short stories, and show how the theme is the same. We will take a look at the way they are written,
Walter Mitty, although he is a figment of someone else’s imagination, reminds me of some of my friends, and ultimately myself. The writer’s main focus is Mr. Mitty’s ability to slip into “another world”, completely forgetting where he is at and what he is doing in the present. The world he slips into is a world that makes him more important than the monotonous world he lives in. Although Mitty isn’t completely cut off from reality, he utilizes his ideal world to cope with his seemingly boring life. One of the reasons that this story caught my attention is because I just taught a class recently in my work center, and actually used this as an example of someone who could be unsafe. With Mr. Mitty drifting in and out of his “perfect” world he would be considered extremely unsafe in the work place. The author showed Mr. Mitty’s ability to switch in between worlds as a platform to show Imagination as we switched worlds in Mr. Mitty’s head. I have caught myself drifting in and out of different situations as I’m doing something extremely mundane or monotonous; like driving across Kansas or Nebraska. James Thurber describes Mr. Mitty’s life like this, “Walter Mitty’s daydream life has much exciting action, his waking life, as recounted in the story, is routine, uneventful, and, at a deep subconscious level, unsatisfying.” (Prinsky, N. ,2004) As we look at Mr. Mitty’s life I have to wonder what else was going on in his life. Was there a specific reason that he pictured himself in the world that he fantasized himself in? The literary approach that I found myself using was the formalist approach. "This approach is most widely used in literary criticism; it focuses on the form and development of the literary work itself." (Clugston, 2010, section 16.2) This approach focuses on the literary techniques and tools instead of on the readers’ emotions and feelings. Some of the techniques that are used in this approach include looking at the characters in the story, the plot, figurative language and point of view of the person observing the story. So let’s take a look at the characters and plot. This story is of a man in a “henpecked” situation. His wife is overbearing, and essentially controlling. She tells him to slow down, where to sit, what to buy, and what to do, etc. He is essentially just her chauffer, and not a whole lot more. He has a sense of desperation to find an outlet to a more fulfilling life, which he finds in daydreaming himself in bigger and better worlds. Mr. Mitty takes certain details out of his real world life and it triggers a daydream. Each day dream takes him out of his miserable existence and into a wonderful world where he rises above his current situation. For example, the first day dream is triggered quite possibly through the rain while taking his wife to the hair dresser. He pictures himself the captain of a Navy Hydroplane going through a storm that was picking up to be a hurricane. The point of view is from a third person perspective. It is someone looking into his life from a “backseat” and observing his demeanor, day dreams, and interactions with his wife. This perspective gives us a unique look into the author’s relationship with the character. Finally, figurative language is used several times in the short story. The pocketa-pocketa-pocketa sound is used several times in this short story. It is used for the “pounding of the cylinders” in the navy hydroplane; also the “new anesthetizer” makes the same sound. This shows that Mr. Mitty’s fantasies are somewhat linked to this sound. It also shows that he is not an expert in these things, just that to him his daydreams are very real to him and not real in reality. This short story had me chuckling and created a deeper appreciation for this short story and others. Literature like this is what sets the bar for the young people in our generation, in writing, and imagination.

References
Clugston, R. W. (2010). What Is Literary Criticism?. Journey into Literature ( Section 16.1). San Diego: Bridgepoint Education, Inc..
Prinsky, N. (2004). The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition, 1-3.