The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

The protagonist of Thurber’s story, through whose eyes the reader sees all the action (real and imagined), is starkly drawn, more of a character sketch than a fleshed-out human with a complicated past. After all, the story is only five pages and unfolds over a couple of hours: The narrative succinctly provides the essential facts about Mitty, and anything more might detract from the character’s resonance and from the story’s humor. Mitty’s age is not given, nor his profession, nor any physical description—as befits his basic anonymity and unimportance in the world, of which Mitty himself is all too aware.

Based on how others treat him, he appears not to cut a very prepossessing or dynamic figure; the parking-lot attendant looks at him “closely” before shouting rudely at him. Mitty is probably middle-aged, since his wife reminds him that he is “no longer a young man” (Paragraph 4), and an elderly man would not likely receive the sort of disrespect that Mitty seems to attract with his minor missteps, like idling a few seconds at a green light. So, the possibility arises that Mitty is in the throes of a midlife crisis—an age-related waning of one’s confidence and sense of self, when missed opportunities, regrets, and fears about the future can prey on the mind and lead to depression or a restless disengagement with life as usual. The story holds some suggestions—such as his wife’s pressure on him to see a doctor—that his episodes of abstractedness, while routine, are not longstanding. Thurber himself was 44 years old when the story was first published, so he may have been writing from experience.

However, the story does not flesh out the underlying psychology of the protagonist’s flights of fancy. Instead, the narrative dramatizes his immediate situation: how completely and frequently he succumbs, in his imagination, to the cheap tropes of dime-store fiction, which seem to fill a gaping vacuum in his thwarted life.

Scholars sometimes compare Mitty to another devotee of melodramatic fiction: Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. A crucial difference is that Cervantes’s hero is genuinely courageous, if deluded: He acts out his chivalrous fantasies in the real world, seeking giants to fight and maidens fair to rescue. Mitty would never take such risks—not in real life. His daydreams are largely a surrogate manhood: a substitute for action, not an inspiration for real-life derring-do. Another, related difference is one of basic psychology: Unlike Quixote, Mitty is fully—even painfully—aware of the difference between reality and fantasy. He just chooses the latter. If he daydreams about a giant, it is with the full knowledge that, as a fantasy, it poses no actual threat. For him, that is much of fantasy’s appeal.

Another literary antecedent is Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the clerk who, day after day, retreats ever more stubbornly into a slough of passivity, doing less and less. This is his quiet rebellion against a world that presumably offends him. But whereas Bartleby’s inner life is a mystery to the reader, Mitty’s is front and center. In his fantasies, Mitty is a fearless sea captain, a world-famous surgeon, an aristocratic marksman, a heroic martyr, a lover of beautiful women. He is never at a loss, always ready with a lightning-fast riposte—whether helming an unwieldy craft through a hurricane or landing a punch on a (deserving) jaw, he is bluff and no-nonsense, always the center of attention, forever the cynosure of onlookers’ breathless awe.

The real Walter Mitty is none of these. Clumsy, craven, slightly deceitful, and saddled with a bullying spouse, Mitty feels utterly trapped in his powerless life. Simple tasks and errands seem almost beyond him, and he loathes being forced to do them. But unlike Bartleby, Mitty does not even have the real-world courage to refuse to go on playing what he must see as a walk-on role in a dreary charade: He defers to both his wife and strangers, only taking his revenge later in his daydreams. With this veiled form of vengance, life does not cooperate, always jolting him back to reality just before the climax. Perhaps this explains why his reveries do not seem to provide much catharsis (as the day progresses, they become increasingly doom-laden): Real life cannot be shut out for long.

All the same, there is a sort of heroism in Mitty. He marshals his imaginative faculties, cheaply nourished though they may be, against the world’s petty injustices and bullying dreariness. He thereby reveals himself to be the enemy of complacency, a believer in finer things. His fantasies, though founded in anger, are not vicious—most of them are altruistic to a fault. His head may be in the clouds, but his heart is clearly in the right place.