46 pages • 1 hour read
James ThurberThe Catbird Seat
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1942A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Character Analysis
Mr. Martin
Mr. Martin is the main character in “The Catbird Seat,” and while the story has a third-person narration, it is filtered through Mr. Martin’s perspective. Even so, it is hard to tell whether Mr. Martin’s loyalty is to Mr. Fitweiler, the company, or simply to the neurotic filing system he has created. What is certain, however, is that he must have things his way, and Mr. Fitweiler confirms more than once that Mr. Martin’s way is the best. Fitweiler describes Mr. Martin as “infallible.” In contrast, after Mr. Martin ousts her, Mrs. Barrows describes him as a “drab, ordinary little man” (4).
While the story is predominantly rendered through concrete detail—there is never any musing on abstract principles or emotion—the narrative derives its essential form and character from the inner life of Mr. Martin. Both the story’s comic spirit and the action of the plot depend on the protagonist’s abnormal interiority; the high-stakes war exists entirely inside Mr. Martin’s head. A significant portion of the story even takes place within the character’s protracted fantasy of himself as an attorney reviewing damning evidence. Counterintuitively, however, it is Mr. Martin’s lack of true imagination that defines him. He is either unwilling or unable to consider others’ perspectives—particularly as they relate to his workplace habits and cherished filing system—and he is loath to fully venture beyond his own ego. When Mrs. Barrows questions his administrative system and asks if all of his filing cabinets are really necessary, she unwittingly threatens a pillar of his identity. The symbolic and disproportionate gravity of her innocent question is comedic.
Instead of using his imagination for relational understanding, Mr. Martin uses it for deception—a feat of cunning that, in some ways, is more manipulative than creative. It is only through part of his murder plot that he is willing to flex the boundaries of the self, breaking his own rules by drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, and using colloquial language to throw people off of his trail. Mr. Martin is a petty man, but given the farcical nature of the story, his plot to murder Mrs. Barrows—as well as his threat against Mr. Fitweiler—is comical rather than grave. Traditionally, a protagonist is somehow transformed by the end of the plot. However, not only does Mr. Martin remain unchanged, but his entire character arc—the whole plot, in fact—is driven by his resistance to transformation.
Mrs. Barrows
It is unclear to what extent Mrs. Barrows truly is abrasive. Her presence, as it is felt by the protagonist, is domineering and unwieldy. Because the narrative is filtered only through Mr. Martin’s perspective, Mrs. Barrows often appears in a way that almost seems subhuman: She is loud, animalistic—according to Mr. Martin—and uncouth. Her colloquialisms make her seem unsophisticated, even though there is no evidence that she is uneducated. Mr. Martin describes her as harsh and manipulative, but as the narrative unfolds, it is increasingly apparent that his perspective may have an uncharitable hyperbolic edge.
His report of Mrs. Barrows situates Mr. Martin within a broad terrain adjacent to “unreliable narrator,” though the short story was authored nearly two decades before the term’s coinage. For example, all Mr. Martin is told about Mrs. Barrows’s first meeting with Mr. Fitweiler is that Mrs. Barrows met him at a party and helped extricate him from an uncomfortable conversation. However, Mr. Martin’s embittered ruminations add details to the anecdote to imply that Mrs. Barrows weaponized her sexuality and that inebriation was involved.
What the reader does know is that Mrs. Barrows is quick-witted at parties, isn’t moralistic about alcohol consumption, has new ideas for the filing department, and enjoys a very unusual amount of figurative, playful language. These are neutral qualities, yet Mr. Martin’s narrative torque characterizes them as threatening, duplicitous, and incompetent—and this is at least partly because these qualities demonstrate psychological flexibility. Such an attribute, insofar as it threatens Mr. Martin’s humdrum equilibrium, confirms Mrs. Barrows as a nemesis.
Mr. Fitweiler
The entire war, as Mr. Martin conceives it, started when the boss of F & S allegedly succumbed to Mrs. Barrows’s charms during a party and then brought her into the organization. Mr. Fitweiler’s character functions as a dramatic pivot: he brings Mrs. Barrows into the company, and he ushers her out. The former action, according to Mr. Martin, was due to Mrs. Barrows’s deceptiveness. The latter action, however, is due to Mr. Martin’s.
Mr. Fitweiler is a source of dramatic irony. He trusts Mr. Martin implicitly, claiming that he is infallible. The outrageousness of Mr. Martin’s scheme is only underscored by Mr. Fitweiler’s unquestioning credulity in Mr. Martin’s integrity—a obliviousness so complacent that when Mrs. Barrows reports Mr. Martin’s threats to him, Mr. Fitweiler assumes that she’s experiencing a major psychiatric disturbance. The readiness of his assumption is a testament to the uncanny consistency of Mr. Martin’s historical behavior at the company, but it is also an indirect testament to Thurber’s intentional engagement of gender stereotypes. Mrs. Barrows approaches Mr. Fitweiler with life-and-death information, and he essentially tells her to “calm down” before shooing her out the door and effectively labelling her a hysteric.
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