The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

The slippery narrative of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” shuttles between two wildly different worlds: one, the dreary routines and mundane settings (parking lot, grocery store, hotel lobby) of 1930s small-town America; the other, the exotic locales and bombastic derring-do of pulp magazines and Hollywood actioners. The effect is a comic portrait of a man woefully out of step with his time and place. This is not to say that the story does not have its serious side as well.

Thurber’s affectionate pulp parodies suggest that he was a longtime fan of melodramatic fiction, which makes him, in his way, a typical American man of his time. For most, these stories were just a fleeting diversion from the pressures of modern life. Walter Mitty, more of a personality sketch than a fully rounded character, may have come to Thurber by way of a simple question—what a person’s life or marriage must be like for them to choose these thrilling but emotionally (and intellectually) barren pulp worlds over the real one, and what this says about the modern world. There is then the question of whether these stories, with their outmoded values, actually make some readers less “masculine” by destroying their initiative.

The American naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) wrote that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” (Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, Ticknor and Fields, 1854). This certainly applies to Walter Mitty, whose method of escape (compulsive daydreaming) differs from that of “the mass of men” only by degree. Mitty, for his part, would not likely consider himself typical: Like his pulp heroes, he sees himself as a man apart, a heroic outsider, struggling to maintain his dignity and manhood in a world, society, and marriage that collude to diminish him. Yet Mitty is an Everyman, and escapist fiction is popular for a reason. Hiding, dreaming, and devising alibis (such as his plan to wear a fake sling on his arm) are hardly foreign to most, though in Mitty’s case these tactics are slightly exaggerated for comic effect: It is natural to succumb, at one time or another, to daydreams of what might have been or might come to be; it’s natural to rummage, in one’s reveries, through templates drawn from popular culture—of kinder, simpler worlds or more romantic, fulfilling lives. Mitty is only a caricature of eminently human complexes (though this story draws largely on male fantasies and insecurities, many of which reflect the era’s misogyny). Much of the story’s humor and poignancy flow from its restrained use of parody and hyperbole in limning the ludicrous disparity between Mitty’s actual, thwarted life and the “secret” one that plays out in dreams of virility and mastery.

Thurber performs his first sleight of hand in the opening paragraph, which sets the stage for the absurd contrast between Mitty’s fantasies and his real life. The paragraph describes an immense military aircraft menaced by a briny sea-storm straight out of a men’s adventure pulp. The “Commander” wears a “full dress uniform” on the bridge, a nod to his lofty rank as well as his military punctiliousness (Paragraph 1). His “heavily braided” cap, which he wears “rakishly” over “one cold gray eye” (Paragraph 1), conjures a dashing esprit de corps as well as unyielding courage. He is clearly a man’s man, as companionable and impressive over drinks in the canteen, perhaps, as at the helm of an immense warship. (Mitty’s fantasy selves are described with more physical detail than the real-life Mitty, who presumably looks nothing like any of them.) His worshipful crew hang on his every word, as he alone can get them out alive: “The Old Man’ll get us through,” they say, “The Old Man ain’t afraid of Hell!” (Paragraph 1). Alas, the sea adventure cuts off before the fantasy narrative arrives at its climax, when Mrs. Mitty breaks the spell by shouting a command of her own (“Not so fast!”), and one can guess why Mitty has chosen this specific avatar from his capacious grab-bag of secret selves (Paragraph 2). He drives a feeble automobile (whose incessant “pocketa-pocketa” finds its way into his reverie as “the pounding of the cylinders”), but he is not in charge of his driving any more than he is of his destiny (Paragraph 1). In both, Mrs. Mitty commands the helm.

This is the first instance of how Mitty’s daydreams work a reversal on a shameful real-life situation. Here, the nickname “The Old Man” derives from the fact that he has been ordered by his wife to buy himself galoshes, because he “is not a young man any longer” (Paragraph 4). So, his imagination showers him with an “old man’s” honors: not a sad pair of overshoes but a beribboned “full dress uniform,” a “cold gray eye” that has seen decades at sea, and the panting admiration of younger sailors for his hard-wrought expertise and valor.

Mrs. Mitty’s next words suggest that her husband’s woolgathering is a regular thing: “It’s one of your days” (Paragraph 3). This is the first hint that Mitty’s daydreams may be his habitual escape from his wife and from his marriage—from a middle-aged union turned dull, loveless, perhaps even humiliating: He would much rather be the one in charge. Indeed, as the reader soon learns, the women in his daydreams are young, attractive, subservient: the “pretty nurse” in the surgeon fantasy, or the “lovely, dark-haired girl” whom he gallantly defends in the courtroom (Paragraph 10). By contrast, and especially later in the story, Mrs. Mitty seems more like a mother or a boss than a partner. Moreover, the events that follow suggest that Mitty’s daily life—simple chores or interactions with strangers—can be just as dispiriting as his unhappy marriage.

Far from the formidable “Commander” of his dreams, Mitty appears incapable of navigating a simple parking lot and gets yelled at by the “insolent” attendant. First, however, a policeman snaps at him for idling at a light, and Mitty automatically pulls on his gloves, as his wife told him to do earlier. This reflex connects Mrs. Mitty with the policeman and, ultimately, the bullies of the world: authorities like the District Attorney in his third fantasy; real-world patronizing know-it-alls like mechanics, parking-lot attendants, and doctors; and, lastly, a spectral figure of doom—the firing squad in the story’s final paragraph.

Like Mitty’s preceding reverie, his fantasy of the surgery casts him as a revered, unflappable paragon. Flustered by his brush with the angry policeman, “Dr. Mitty” now radiates a surgical steadiness and cool, and, waited on by pretty nurses, relishes the sight of Dr. Renshaw himself, haggardly begging for his help. The daydream’s every element somehow aggrandizes the dreamer. The patient is naturally a bigwig: not only a millionaire banker but a close friend of the president. Dr. Mitty’s courage and expertise—as well as his modesty—are nothing short of awe-inspiring. He has written “brilliant” tomes on obscure diseases like “streptothricosis”; is lavishly praised by lesser adepts as the best surgeon going; and can even repair a “huge, complicated” anesthetizer within seconds. This last scenario links the doctor with Mitty’s other avatars as both a dashing man of action and a master of machines; the malfunctioning “anesthetizer” has been introduced partly to allow Mitty to do something boldly physical, almost swashbuckling, in the otherwise sedate setting of the operating room. When Dr. Mitty finally draws on his gloves, it is with a sort of professional noblesse oblige: a favor to his fellow surgeons, the president, the country itself. In reality, the jargon in this scene is nonsense, a comic element accentuating that this is indeed the outlandish daydream of a layman.

His third daydream gives unprecedented insight into how Mitty experiences his marriage, or at least how he experiences his wife. The reverie is triggered by his wife’s reminding him to buy some item that has since gone clear out of his head; in the fantasy, she is subsumed by a strident District Attorney who, in a sensational murder trial, sarcastically accuses Mitty of forgetfulness: “Perhaps this will refresh your memory” (Paragraph 10).

The “crack shot” defendant is the most mysterious of Mitty’s secret selves, since it is unclear what exactly he is. All that is certain is that he is (again) accomplished, unflappable, and probably famous, as his prowess with “any sort of firearms” seems a matter of public record (Paragraph 10). Moreover, whether he is an Olympic sharpshooter, a war hero, or even an aristocratic big-game hunter, he is on trial for a gunshot murder committed on July 14—Bastille Day—a date rife with connotations of foreign intrigue and revolution.

Again, Thurber drops in a cool reversal of one of Mitty’s real-life losses of face: Rather than take refuge behind a potentially life-saving alibi (his lawyer’s claim that he wore a sling on his right arm on that fatal day), Mitty boasts that he could easily have taken out “Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with [his] left hand” (Paragraph 10). It seems Mitty the crack shot is already ashamed of his counterpart’s pusillanimous plan to wear a fake sling to the garage. Each of Mitty’s daydreams contains a smattering of dismal (often disgraceful) echoes of his real life, sublimated into tropes of courage, nobility, and power.

Amidst the courtroom’s “pandemonium,” a high-pitched scream rings out, and “a lovely, dark-haired girl” fights her way to him (Paragraph 10). Her connection to the case, or to Mitty, is unclear: She may be Mitty’s wife, lover, or daughter. She may be Fitzhurst’s wife. Maybe Mitty has gallantly taken the fall for her, the true murderer. (That would fit in nicely with Mitty’s martyr complex.) Possibly, the daydreamer himself does not yet know, or care. What matters is the accessory to his manliness: the love of a beautiful woman.

But these reveries provide little or no catharsis. As the day wears on, Mitty’s daydreams grow only darker. The second-to-last, in which he imagines himself a fearless RAF pilot, is his most dangerous exploit yet, perhaps a suicide mission. Significantly, for a timid man whose frustrations have been mounting throughout the day, his fantasy-self finds himself boxed in by artillery: “‘The box barrage is closing in,’ said the sergeant” (Paragraph 13). A glorious death may be the only escape. Captain Mitty’s “faint, fleeting smile” evokes the dashing fatalism of suave, self-sacrificing idols of 1930s cinema, specifically French (e.g., Jean Gabin, of Grand Illusion and Pepe le Moko) (Paragraph 13). Striding off happily to his sacrifice, he hums the French song “Auprès de Ma Blond” (“Next to my girlfriend”), but his vision of romance is shattered when his wife prods his shoulder (Paragraph 13). Reprimanded for “hiding” from her in the hotel lobby, Mitty can only squeak, “Things close in” (Paragraph 14). This utterance recalls William Wordsworth’s famous lament about the passing of wonder and beauty from the world: “Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy” (Wordsworth, William. “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” Poems, 1804).

As the Mittys leave the hotel, the revolving door makes a “derisive” sound: The world’s bullying conspiracy against Walter Mitty now includes even its inanimate objects. For Mitty, the (real) world itself is a sort of revolving door, an endless loop of shameful memories and petty humiliations. Modern inventions play an essential part in this, not just mechanical doors but traffic lights, galoshes, snow chains, even advertising slogans for puppy biscuits. In his fantasies, of course, Mitty masters every modern device, from hydroplanes to firearms, even correcting a faulty “anesthetizer” with a canny improvisation.

Perhaps modern man, with his many inventions, is too coddled, too isolated from life in the raw, to feel truly alive. The irony is that Mitty’s manly pulp magazines are themselves products of the modern age and coddle him in their own way, preventing him from taking any real steps toward self-improvement or true happiness. They are a poor, fleeting substitute for the macho self-reliance and respect that he craves. They perpetuate, too, a standard of masculinity that few—least of all Mitty—can ever live up to, exacerbating his feelings of inadequacy and futility.

Behind the story’s humor, an inherent sadness resides in the possibility that Mitty has given up almost entirely on life and succumbed to the reflex of running and hiding. The narrative holds no suggestion that he does anything to make himself handier or more skillful. For instance, he does not teach himself how to take the snow chains off his tires but instead plans to use deception—a fake sling—to avert the garageman’s “grinning” contempt (or what Mitty may imagine to be contempt). His daydreaming allows him to avoid the tasks and challenges of the real world.

Nevertheless, Mitty clings tenaciously to his “secret life,” though it may detract from his real one, erode his initiative, and subject him to further petty humiliations at the hands of his wife and strangers—and there remains something romantic and uncompromising in his quixotic refusal to yield to the demands of reality. Moreover, despite his bitterness, his dream-selves all live (and die) by the heroic, often self-sacrificing code of the pulp hero; they are never just vessels for petty revenge.

At the close of the story, his wife subjects him to a final, casual indignity, forcing him to wait for her outside a drugstore because she “forgot something.” On cue, it begins to rain and sleet. Nevertheless, the reader knows that Mitty will offer no complaint—his desperation is of the quietest sort—even though his wife, who habitually scolds him for his forgetfulness, offers no apology for her own. Instead, reprising the “faint, fleeting smile” of the doomed RAF bomber (Paragraph 15), he stands erect in the falling sleet, disdainfully facing down his enemies (not only his wife but the whole drearily oppressive modern world), who now assume the effigy of a firing squad. The true enemy may be Fate itself, which has dropped Walter Mitty into a body, place, and time that will never sanction his dreams of glory.

A proud martyr—perhaps a condemned spy from a nobler land—he shuns the proffered blindfold, just as he scorned the alibi of the arm sling, and says not another word, “inscrutable to the last” (Paragraph 15). Thurber’s final irony may be his hero’s blustering notion that he is confronting his fate with eyes wide open: As usual, the scales remain firmly in place.

There will always be debates about whether Mitty’s passivity is, in the end, admirable or contemptible—or whether it really is passivity, or else a form of visionary potency. Nevertheless, the character’s Everyman quality, together with his tenacity as a dreamer and an underdog, does much to ameliorate his less positive traits. As a result, Walter Mitty’s place in the pantheon of fictional heroes who have become archetypes—Tom Sawyer, Sherlock Holmes, Don Quixote, and others—has already outlasted, by many decades, his own reading choices: the pulp magazines he so avidly consumed.