...The Secret life of Walter Mitty and The story of an Hour David Babers ENG 125 Sabine Reljic January 27, 2014 The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and The Story of an Hour share a variety of similarities along with many differences. The main points of these stories shows the dynamics love within their marriage but in different way; both woman share common bond of tolerance, for their significant other when it comes to the lack of certain things in their marriage. One of the first similarities of the two stories I notice was the fact that both of the men wives was extremely concerned about their significant others well being. Even though the displayed their affection for their husbands with different actions it was more than obvious that each of them was in sync with their other half’s. Both of the literary pieces where written and described in different points of view. “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” was written in the form of an omniscient third person point of view. This allows the narrator to describe his own thoughts of the character as the story progresses. But as far is the character Mrs. Mitty it seems as she speaks in more so a first person point of view, as her words and thoughts seems to be more so given in a direct and plain form. As for the “The Story of anf Hour” it is also written in the third person point of view, but it would be considered more so as a limited third person omniscient. “This is a point of view when the thoughts and feelings...
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...The Secret Life of Walter Mitty Cadina Odum ENG125 Mary Lounsbury March 17, 2013 The Secret Life of Walter Mitty “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (Thurber, 1939) is a short story by James Thurber. The most famous of Thurber’s stories, it first appeared in The New Yorker on March 18, 1939. This short story deals with a vague and mild-mannered man who drives into Waterbury, Connecticut and his wife for their regular weekly shopping and his wife’s visit to the beauty parlor. During this time he has five heroic daydream episodes, ranging from being a pilot in the U.S. Navy flying boat to being on a secret suicide mission to bomb an ammunition dump. In the following paragraphs I will tell why this story captured my interest, describe an analytical approach and evaluate this work and the meaning of the story. This story using great detail with descriptive, imaginative wording brings the reader in and allows you to visualize what he is daydreaming. This is the type of writing that draws me in and allows me to imagine what is going on. This work is a good example of farce (a comedy; a short play, in which both subtle humor and hilarity are developed through improbable situations, exaggeration and (often) ridiculous antics) (Clugston, 2010). Selected to show how humor can be used imaginatively in a story to illustrate the need for communication in human relationships: Mitty’s immersion in extraordinary matters of his dream world blocks him from sensitivity to his wife’s...
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...“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber is a story of an elder gentlemen trapped in his own world while erratically being pulled back into reality. Throughout the story, you see different parts and moments of his life as well as glimpses of his true present reality. The story drags the reader back in time where Walter is a younger, more free, independent man. This idea is contrasted with glimpses of his reality, where he is more dependent on others including his wife. I work in an assisted living facility where we have residents who are cognitive but we also have residents that have severe Dementia. This story reminds me a lot of their lives. They tend to live in an alternate state of mind, their disease causes them to revert to...
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...story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,”. That is hat this paper will be about. The story starts of with Mitty in a daydream were he is a brave military commander piloting a hydroplane. His wife interrupts this by exclaiming that he is driving too fast. That is when you relis it was a mear daydream and in real life the Mittys are out on some errands. This pattern of daydreaming wile he is doing other takes is repeated several times through out the story. When she urges him to make an appointment with his physician, his mind drifts off to were he becomes an eminent surgeon at work. That is at least until a parking-lot attendant’s contemptuous commands temporarily call him back to reality....
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...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...
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...In the story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber is about a man named Walter Mitty,who drifts into fantasies a lot because he is just ordinary in reality with a nagging wife who loves him very much. In the fantasies, he is the hero,fearless,brave,respected and extraordinary. I believe that Mrs.Mitty’s actions are motivated by the fact that she has to protect him from himself and has his best interests at heart. When Walter Mitty is daydreaming he does not pay attention what his are actions and surroundings around him are,but Mrs. Mitty does. In the story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is about a man that daydreams many times and his wife looks out for him. One day, Mrs.Mitty told Walter to get overshoes,so he could protect his shoes from harsh weather. This quote illustrates this...
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...Walter Mitty, a man living the life of his dreams. The author of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, James Thurber made his protagonist as an everyday man. The story encompasses around the protagonist’s interactions. His wife, Mrs. Mitty is a women who constantly badgers him. Walter Mitty usually escapes by drifting off into a more adventurous daydream. Boring events such as waiting at a hospital, or even reading a magazine may trigger a daydream, which are usually interrupted by Mrs. Mitty. Walter is described as a timid man who deals with real situations and conflicts with imaginary adventures. The amount of daydreams make me question the story because his daydreams have a masculine storyline, in which he is the center of attention. In my opinion, the themes mentioned in the short story is mostly marriage and masculinity, in which I question his life, doesn’t Walter Mitty feel manly enough? It intrigued me on how he was always daydreaming about being a character who draws all the attention to himself, such as being a pilot or even a surgeon....
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...The Secret Life of Walter MItty, by Ben Stiller, is a hilarious action filled comedy. Walter Mitty is loved because of jokes and the actors reactions. Many laughs were heard when Walter was in the airport in Afghanistan, hitting the security officers. In addition, Walter Mitty was full of action. His daydreams were filled with action. He was filled with action when he went to Greenland, in the Atlantic ocean, Iceland, the Himalayas, then Afghanistan. In a week, he went to Greenland and went into a helicopter, then he went to a boat, jumped out, almost is eaten by a shark, then got on board. Next, he went to iceland and went to the volcano, looking for Sean O'connell, when the volcano erupted and he drove away with a person that found him. Within...
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...Throughout The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber a man named Walter Mitty vicissitudes from the fantasy of his imagination to his mundane and ordinary life. Thurber expresses Mitty’s perspective of himself by changing the diction and language used in each different fantasyof his fantasies. Atlast, Thurber conceals the theme of the story within Mitty’s commonplace reality. In Mitty’s first day dream, “the roaring of the SN202 through the worst storm in twenty years of Navy flying” (Thurber 1), Mitty is the Commander of a hydroplane in danger of being consumed by a hurricane. Thurber creates a confident and self-assured characterization for the Commander. An example of this is when Mitty’s lieutenant offers an idea out of place. Mitty...
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...Salhi Mohammed G7 When life gets boring, when people around you push you to the limits, day dreaming is the key to survive all this, at least this is true for Walter Mitty who chose to escape his pathetic life by diving in fantasy. Walter Mitty is a character created and used by James Thurber in a comic way to walk us through the problem of weak, henpecked men. The story shows the poor Walter gets bossed by His nagging wife, who keeps giving orders and criticizes harshly on everything Walter does; those complaints stand out clearly in her dialog "Not so fast! You're driving too fast! […]You know I don't like to go more than forty". After those barks at Mr. Mitty face he slowed down and drove in silence, and despite Walter Stubbornness he always give in and obey to his wife orders. During the story Walter Mitty is being shown like a child whose mother keeps dictating orders which he have to do without any objection. Day dreaming was Mitty’s saver from his ruled pathetic life, the lack of power and control in his real life made him chose heroic dreams in order to obtain more strength and more self-esteem to fill the void his wife made, those dreams were activated by various events, as the story begins Walter was driving his wife to the beauty shop while he was imagining himself as the commander of plane which was in trouble but the members of the crew have faith in his ability to get them through “The Old Man'll get us through”, so did he satisfy his thirst for control ...
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...James Thurber’s best known story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” is a fictional story of an ordinary husband, Walter Mitty, who performs ordinary tasks and constantly day dreams of being an extraordinary man performing high profile tasks. The story itself begins with Mitty imagining himself as a courageous military commander who is piloting a Navy hydroplane through a storm, when he is ticked off by his wife for driving too fast, he comes back to reality but soon goes back into his fantasy world by imagining himself as a famous surgeon performing a critical surgery on a millionaire banker. The pattern is repeated several times as he further imagines himself being interrogated in a courtroom for murder, followed by a patriotic World War 1 British pilot willing to die for his country and lastly as he waits for his wife outside the drugstore, he imagines himself as an undefeated wanted man smoking his last cigarette waiting to be shot by a firing squad. Throughout the story, Walter Mitty is constantly trying to escape his monotonous life and has to be constantly brought back to reality by others around him. Most of the time it is his almost ‘mother-like’ wife who is always looking all over for him. This sort of behavior is almost expected out of Mitty and seems to have been happening for a while as when she pulls him out of his first day dream she even says that, “it’s one of your days, I wish you’d let Dr. Renshaw look you over.” His wife is clearly the dominant one in their...
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...The Secret Life of Walter Mitty VS The Necklace April Kahl ENG 125 Introduction to Literature Angela di Guaico March 3, 2014 When comparing and contrasting short stories. One should look at tone, irony, theme, symbolism, and imagination. When all these literary terms are combined they make stories. The secret Life of Walter Mitty, and The Necklace, there is similarities in gender role of the characters, but there is differences, both of these short stories represent relationships in their marriage, through the main characters, and the roles they play. In this paper I will explain the similarities as well as the differences the characters play in both stories. I chose these two stories because they both have the same theme about marriage and love. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and The Necklace are written in third-person narration, and throughout the two stories one person point of view it also allows you to see the dreams and thoughts of the main characters. In ‘ The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’, you are given some insight to his imagination of events throughout his day of errands that his wife is having him do while she is getting her hair done at the salon. In ‘ The Necklace’, you are given some insight into Madame Loise’s unhappy and depressing life that she lives and when she is given the opportunity to go this high end event we get to see w her at the ball in her dream, in the dream she is admired as...
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...In the short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber, the main character, Walter Mitty, daydreams that he is a star surgeon, soldier, and witness. He always imagines himself as the hero in a story that he creates from a little piece of the reality that surrounds him. I often do the same thing, however Walter Mitty’s daydreams contain a little less reality than mine do. Walter Mitty takes just one piece of the world around him, such as the hospital that he just drove by or the calls of a newsboy advertising a court trial, while I usually reimagine the situation that I am already in. In my daydreams I am usually the hero; however, I am not always the hero, as sometimes be the student under direction of a star teacher or the person receiving help....
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...Theme and Narrative Elements of the Secret Life of Walter Mitty Josetta James ENG 125 Introduction to Literature Instructor: Angela di Gualco 01/10/2014 Theme and Narrative Elements of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” The theme is one of the most involved elements of a short story. The themes job is to give the readers the over-all idea that is fabricated behind a story. A short story is marked as portraying broad ideas and elements into small pieces. In short, the theme in a story reflects or serves as the presentation of its ideas. (Clugston, 2010) The objective of this essay is to reveal the ways in which the literary elements tone and character contribute to the larger narrative theme by analyzing the short story by James Thurber titled The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. James Thurber created the character of Walter Mitty whose life seems so ordinary and boring. Walter Mittys imagination (daydreams) helps him to escape his dull life. His imagination places him in heroic situations such as a commander in the Navy steering his crew though bad weather in an 8-engine Navy hydroplane, or thinks he's a famous surgeon who is asked to help a rich Englishman, who is a friend of President Roosevelt. James Thurber set the tone for Character Walter Mitty by his actions of day dreaming, escaping reality Tone is more than merely an author’s attitude toward his/her audience and characters; it is the stylistic means by which an author conveys his/her Attitudes in a work of literature...
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...Abstract I have chosen to compare the two short stories “The Story of an Hour”, by Kate Chopin and “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, by James Thurber. “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is a short story written in 1937. The main character is an older man that drives his wife to town for beauty parlor visits and weekly shopping. “The Story of an Hour” was published in 1894. The main character, Louise Mallard, thinks that she will find freedom from the death of her husband. These short stories share a common theme, gender roles within a marriage. Each of the main characters in these stories has their own ideas about the gender roles that they are supposed to play, according to society and the time that they live in. The secret life of Walter Mitty and The Story of an Hour are based on a man Mr. Walter Mitty and a woman Mrs. Louise Mallard, whom believe that they have become prisoners within their marriages. They have to abide by the society standards of their era, divorce is not an option because all marriages have issues and the wedding vows need to be honored, “Until Death due us Part”. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty Versus The Story of an Hour In “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” Walter is an elderly American man who is retired and has nothing better to do but to follow his wife around. Walter daydreams about a life that he wishes he had. The focus of this story is to represent a fantasy world opposed to a reality. “The Story of the Hour” presents a much more dramatic...
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