The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber

Walter Mitty's alternation between a life of boredom and frustration on the one hand and dreams of fulfillment on the other seems to lend itself very easily to a psychoanalytic reading. Mitty is an escapist because his fantasies don't provide any insight or help him work through situations he faces in reality. One-way EscapismĪlthough it may seem obvious, it is important to note that all of Walter Mitty's fantasies leap out of reality, as it were, and do not return to them: the end of each dream is occasioned by a tailing off or an abrupt cut (accompanied by psychological shock) back to reality, where he finds himself at a different point from where he began to daydream. While this may seem to be an embarrassing quality of Mitty's, one which leads the reader to look down upon both his imaginative ability and his suffering sensibility, it also works as a testament to the power of literature and art-even of the most conventional sort, to transport us out of our daily lives. Cliché and ConventionĪlthough Walter Mitty is very imaginative, one cannot but notice that none of his daydreams are what we might properly call 'original': he places himself into a scene that seems taken out of an action story, comic book, or movie. Although it is not made clear whether the narrative is seen entirely from Mitty's point of view, or whether there is an omniscient narrator aware of more than he is, the profusion and vividness of details in the story point towards a character who is (painfully) aware of all the richness in the world-a richness that he himself has access to only in his fantasies.

Walter Mitty is only able to imagine so vividly (and to suffer such intense embarrassment because he possesses a heightened sensitivity. Mitty invents specific stories in order to escape from specific frustrations in his life. That his imagination is so constituted means that while it gains strength in inverse proportion to the embarrassment and frustration he feels in 'real life,' it is also limited by the gaps he has to fill up in the latter. Though we begin the story in his imagination and follow his fantasies over the course of the narrative, we learn not just about what the man can think up and desire, but also that from which he wants to flee: his nagging wife, his humdrum day-to-day existence, his social ineptness. Walter Mitty has a 'secret life' not simply because he is an imaginative fellow, but because he is an unhappy man. Buy Study Guide The Compensatory Function of the Imagination

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber