The Secret Life of Walter Mitty Essay Questions

How would you interpret the episode in which the district attorney hits a woman, Mitty's supposed lover, and then Mitty hits him back? What does this say about Mitty's own character that he should imagine such a scene positively?

On a first level, we might note that Mitty's personas, though ranging over a great diversity of professions, all embody the same cool, selfless, and glorious ideal of masculinity. In the courtroom scene, it is significant that Mitty is not the first to strike a blow; his violence is not blindly aggressive but bound up with a sense of honor. In this case, as is paradigmatic of the very notion of chivalrous honor, he acts to protect, or avenge, a woman, who is depicted as helpless and hysterical. Paradoxically, however, since this whole scene, including the district attorney's striking the woman, has been generated by Mitty's imagination, we may imagine that in an unconscious sense that there is not so much dissimilarity between Mitty's virtuous strike for the woman and his opponent's dastardly strike against the woman.

What is the significance of Mitty's talking to himself in reality? How does it relate to the daydreams, which he presumably only visualizes and hears in his own head?

Most of the time when Mitty dreams, all of the narrative that is presented to us the readers appears to be taking place solely in his head, silently to outsiders; it is as though we are privy to a movie that he is projecting and watching in his brain. However, Thurber depicts imagination as far more dynamic and embodied of a process than the figure of an abstract movie theater may suggest; we realize that material and verbal suggestions enter Mitty's imagination from the outside scenes, and that the words in Mitty's mind sometimes leak out to the outside. In the latter case, Mitty always ends up embarrassing himself, because other people do not have a full picture of what is going on in his head; his frustration at this inevitable incompleteness of communication is what leads him to exclaim to his wife, "Does it ever occur to you that I am thinking?"

What kind of tropes and models from literary tradition might have Thurber drawn upon in creating the character of Walter Mitty, split between a real life and a "secret life"?

Nineteenth-century writers such as the German E.T.A. Hoffman ("The Sandman") and Robert Louis Stevenson ("Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde") established the figure of the Doppelgänger, or double, as one of the pillars of Romantic literature and perhaps the best-known form of literary exploration into the unconscious. Although not so dark and mysterious, Thurber's splitting Walter Mitty into two diametrically opposed selves partakes of the same dynamics of this form. Most significantly, the split protagonist, and the reader along with him, is confronted with the question of identity: Which self is the real Walter Mitty? The answer, of course, ends up being not one nor the other, but either a sort of combination of the two, or more radically, not properly either, but the very difference between them.

What would a story told from the point of view of Mrs. Mitty look like? That is not to ask, what kind of things would she do or think about, but: as compared to Mr. Mitty's split life, how would Mrs. Mitty's life be narrated?

From what we can glean from what she says in the story, Mrs. Mitty is, unlike her husband, a person who says what she thinks and thinks little more than what she says. That said, it might be unfair to consider her entirely superficial, as Walter and, one could say, Thurber do. As a woman in late 1930s Connecticut, or just as a woman at all, she must pay much more attention to her appearances and the impressions she gives others than does her hapless husband. She must also take care of her household, including at least one man-child and one dog. The inevitable pressures of these responsibilities require, as do her husband's frustrations, some kind of outlet; so we can imagine that she communicates her emotions to Walter through complaining, but also that she might complain and chat with other, likely female, friends—perhaps even at the hairdresser's. And so, her story would be seemingly little action but high dynamic, and almost constantly, in dialogue.

What is the historical significance of Mitty's World War I fantasy, given the context of the story's publication in March 1939?

It is important to keep in mind that the battle scenes in the story take place in World War I (1914-1918), not World War II (1939-1945), as the story was published just on the eve of the outbreak of the latter. Thurber mentions specifically that the copy of Liberty that Mitty picks up is an old copy, and details from the scene itself—the prominence of artillery barrages, the stated newness of flamethrowers, bombers small enough to be flown by two men, or even just one, and the novelty of air warfare—point the readers towards the context of the First World War.