The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Jargon is the technical language peculiar to a certain profession, phenomenon, or field of study. In Mitty’s daydreams, his inept use of jargon subtly lampoons his efforts to lend both verisimilitude to his pipedreams and an aura of prowess to his various heroic personae. Because Mitty is mostly ignorant of the proper jargon—as were many pulp writers—he peppers his reveries rather randomly with quasi-terminology that “sounds” right to him but is actually absurd.

In his first daydream, for instance, he haplessly locates “turrets” in the propulsion system of a hydroplane. In his surgery daydream, a patient suffers from “obstreosis” (a fictitious ailment that sounds like a cross between osteoporosis and obstreperous), which, further, is “tertiary”—a medical term referring only to syphilis, which clearly is not the case here (Paragraph 5). Later, “coreopsis” sets in, which sounds grave indeed, unless the reader knows it for the name of a common garden flower. In the courtroom scene, Mitty refers to his handgun as a “Webley-Vickers 50.80,” a preposterous combination of revolver and machine gun, with an impossibly wide bore. In the WWI scenario, a sergeant warns of “the Archies” lobbing flak at RAF planes—muddling “archie” (slang for anti-aircraft fire) with “Jerries” (Germans)—and further, garbles the name of the Red Baron, Von Richthofen, as “Von Richtman.”

Like the onomatopoeic “pocketa,” Mitty’s misuse of jargon betrays the risible limits of his imagination: A device meant to add convincing detail to his daydreams and to blazon his expertise has precisely the opposite effect.

Among the most dramatic of Thurber’s devices is his repurposing of timeworn pulp-fiction tropes to expose the psychology and foibles of his daydreaming protagonist. He accomplishes this through parody, a (mostly) affectionate mode of satire. Parody teases out the innate absurdities of a genre or work of art by means of exaggeration or a sly shift in emphasis or context. The creation of parody, as well as the appreciation for it, demand an intimacy with the work being lampooned; as the critic Eric Ormsby notes, “The parodist must inhabit his victim’s voice down to its least inflections—with close and lingering attention to those very flourishes an author is proudest of—only to turn the voice to ridiculous effect” (Ormsby, Eric. “The Sincerest Form of Ridicule.” Wall Street Journal, 2010).

Thurber was a devotee of sensational fiction, and his parodies might almost pass for the “real” thing if not for a certain too-muchness that they all share. The trial scene, for instance, checkboxes every courtroom cliché with dizzying speed: the badgering DA, the lawyer shouting “Objection!,” the judge “rap[ping] for order” (Paragraph 10), the (bigshot) defendant’s sensational confession, a “lovely” girl making a scene, and an “excited buzz” in the courtroom that rises to “pandemonium” as our hero punches the DA. These hackneyed melodramatic events come so fast and furiously, the only possible effect is comedy. The crowning touch, as with all of the story’s tightly calibrated parodies, is the wider context: the reader’s knowledge that meek, clumsy Walter Mitty has put it all together from shreds and patches of his own wishes, lusts, and insecurities. To Mitty, it is not absurd at all; it is his actual, powerless life that is absurd. What looks, to readers, like parody is simply Mitty’s thwarted hopes and desires in their purest, most sincere form. This ties into another of Thurber’s devices: irony.