LITERARY CRITICISM

Literary Criticism

Literary Criticism

Introduction

Literary criticism has always been considered crucial in judging, analyzing and evaluating literatures. This paper will also critically analyze the masterpiece of James Thurber, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” A versatile writer who have command over different forms of writing including essay writing, playwright, short stories and others. However, he is well-known as a comic writer, as his masterpiece “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is being acclaimed throughout the world. Synoptically, the story revolves around a fictitious character Walter Mitty, an average middle-class person, who has done nothing extraordinary throughout his life, starts daydreaming. Walter Mitty is being ignored and hardly known by the people; consider himself as hero in his dreams, trying to accomplish what is impossible. Every dream of Walter Mitty is inspired by his surroundings, and the whole story revolves around Walter Mitty and his dreams.

Thesis Statement

What fantasize Walter Mitty?

Critical Analysis

In particular, can we determine whether Mitty lapses into fantasies because he is married to a nagging wife and is physically and emotionally inept, or do his wife's complaints and his own blunders stem from his proclivity toward fantasizing? Most critics have assumed the former conclusion to account for the structure of Mitty's life. As Charles Holmes writes, “In reality, Walter Mitty is inadequate to the demands of the real world: his wife bullies him, the parking lot attendant sneers at his awkward efforts to park the car, he cannot remember the shopping list, but in his secret world of fantasy, derived largely from bad movies, he triumphs over the humiliating forces of the actual” (Fensch 2001, pp. 42-43). This at first seems to be a logical assumption. Nevertheless, a close examination of the structure of the story suggests that Mitty's problems with his wife and the rest of the outside world could just as easily be the result and not the cause of his fantasies. But this explanation is overlooked by readers and critics.

The story begins in the middle of Walter Mitty's Naval Commander fantasy. Although the immediate cause of this fantasy is not apparent, soon it has been learnt that driving his wife to town through terrible weather triggered the daydream. In the same way throughout the story, Mitty's fantasies stem directly from some detail of his environment that he transforms imaginatively, not directly from reactions to his wife or to other people. He imagines being the famous physician after he drives past the hospital, the defendant after the newspaper boy yells out the headline about the Waterbury trial, the bombardier after reading the magazine headline, “can Germany conquer the world through the air” (Thurber 2008, pp. 15) and the hero facing the firing squad after lighting a cigarette and leaning against a stone wall. This is not to suggest that Mrs. Mitty has had no part in influencing Walter's imaginative life: she is the reason he is driving to town in the first place; she instructs him to wear his gloves and to purchase overshoes and puppy biscuits; he ...