The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty Literary Elements

Genre

Short story

Setting and Context

The action takes place in Waterbury, Connecticut around 1938.

Narrator and Point of View

Third-person limited, following the perspective of protagonist Walter Mitty

Tone and Mood

Comic, Ironic

Protagonist and Antagonist

Walter Mitty (protagonist) vs Mrs. Mitty, or reality itself (antagonist)

Major Conflict

Walter Mitty is inept with practical matters and suffers under his wife's henpecking.

Climax

Mitty fantasizes himself before a firing squad.

Foreshadowing

All of Mitty's fantasies involve some sort of fatal danger, leading to the finality of the firing squad daydream.

Understatement

Expressing his frustration at her constantly interrupting his daydreaming: Mitty asks his wife at the end: "Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking?" He is clearly deeply unhappy, but can only phrase his upset as a rhetorical question.

Allusions

Mitty as a captain in World War I hums the French soldier's song "Auprès de ma blonde."

Imagery

All of Mitty's fantasies take place in highly stylized, almost cinematic scenes. For example, his World War I fantasy has the whole trench dugout trembling under the impacts of artillery shells, with dirt and pieces of wood thrown about.

Paradox

Mitty has a clear grasp of what it means to be a very masculine man, a type his personas embody in his dreams; but in real life, he feels emasculated and frustrated.

Parallelism

Mitty as a criminal punches a man and calls him "Your miserable cur!" The literal meaning of the insult then makes him think of "puppy biscuits," the item his wife told him to buy.

Metonymy and Synecdoche

Mitty's impressive guns (a pistol as as criminal, a machine gun as a soldier) represent his prowess in combat.

Personification

Several machines in the story are described as making a "pocketa-pocketa" sound that makes them almost like characters speaking.

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