The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber

To sum up, Walter Mitty is a victim of female authority. His genius as well as his preferences and ability to feel are not taken into account by a person allegedly created to address such a calling of the heart.

To be precise, Walter cannot keep up with the essence of so controversial happiness he has at the time. “Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking” (Thurber 17)? This is the point that characterizes Walter as manly enough to refute the claim of his spouse to put overshoes on. Hence, he gets no sense in shaping the reality in which he lives.

He is solely involved in the process of fantasizing and dreaming through and through. That is the way that encompasses the tragic estimation of Walter’s life. He claims more personal freedom by letting himself know that his wife’s instructions do not apply to him. He is sick and tired to suffer from such a monotonous life full of notations of his wife. Engaging in fantasy is the case of Walter’s triumph over his misery in life (Mathews 28). The excerpt in the book when he shouts about the fact that it is natural for him to be thinking invigorates the gist of the whole story. Dreams serve to be a so-called shelter for Walter’s sensitive, though steadfast, soul.

He dares disengage himself from the harmful effect going from his spouse. However, Walter Mitty has found a better way to step back from the constant outside pressure on him. It constitutes their forceful influence beyond physical reality but by moral provocations or just ignorance. This decisive moment in the story proves the assumption that women are not powerless in their relationships with men. She claims with a sort of condemnation: “Remember to get those overshoes while I’m having my hair done” (Thumber 8).

It is a point at which the female and male parties are contradicting each other following personal intentions. He even dares not to do so, for taking over his wife, he could face a new obstacle in relationships. They say that Mitty is weak in his moral background, for he cannot explain to his wife the way things go around him. Walter Mitty is a victim of female pretenses concerning life prospects in the marital reality. Here comes the more social character of the story as opposed to its moral side. The way the story is narrated provides a cross-relational discourse between Mitty’s inner world of dreaming and the real essence of dying from enduring the tension from his wife. However, the tragedy of Mitty is in the fact that he encounters misunderstanding and gross indifference on the part of his wife.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber