A Comparison of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and “The Story of an Hour”

A Comparison of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and “The Story of an Hour”

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

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 (Fensch 2001, pp. 42-43). This at first seems to be a logical assumption. 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 has to wait in the hotel lobby and outside the drugstore for her. At the same time, the fact that Mitty uses such physical details as the starting points for his reveries would suggest how easily he lapses into an imaginary world. As Carl Sundell has noted, “`The Secret Life' begins with him dreaming and ends with him dreaming, he is, in fact, a chronic daydreamer” (Longman 2003, ...