"We're going through!"
The opening line of Thurber’s short story places the reader directly into the middle of an action scene. No context is provided to indicate that the action is anything but the opening line of a story having something to do with the military. What Thurber is striving for by doing this is to give the same immediate sense of reality to Walter’s fantasy life as is given to his real life. For Walter, there really is no dividing line; the life inside his head is every bit as real as the life taking place around him outside his imagination at any given point. By withholding context, this first line gives the reader an experience of this same thrill.
"Not so fast! You're driving too fast!" said Mrs. Mitty. "What are you driving so fast for?"
After the opening paragraph describing emergency action taking place on board a Navy hydroplane, Mrs. Mitty’s domineering personality intrudes for the first time into Walter’s fantasy life and the reader finally becomes aware of the true content of the story. The introduction to Mrs. Mitty is perfectly pitched because the relatively tame nature of her dominance over her husband simultaneously reveals just how little it takes to control Walter, thus providing tremendous insight to the personalities of both husband and wife.
A woman’s scream rose above the bedlam and suddenly a lovely, dark-haired girl was in Walter Mitty’s arms.
Not for the first time, a woman in in Mitty’s fantasy life is pointedly described in terms of physical attractiveness. In fact, most of the woman who call the inside of Walter’s mind home are pretty. At least, those women who are not one of the league of various enemies whom Walter always heroically overcomes. The suggestion here is that part of the impetus behind Walter’s need to establish an identity inside his mind is related to at least a certain level of frustration with his relationship to the woman to whom he is married.
Once, he had tried to take his chains off, outside New Milford, and he had got them wound around the axles. A man had had to come out in a wrecking car and unwind them, a young, grinning garageman. Since then Mrs. Mitty always made him drive to a garage to have the chains taken off. The next time, he thought, I’ll wear my right arm in a sling; they won’t grin at me then. I’ll have my right arm in a sling and they’ll see I couldn’t possibly take the chains off myself.
Mitty’s need to escape into fantasy cannot be explained solely by his being a henpecked husband. His submissive mental state, which has been exploited by his wife, occasionally manifests itself in ways that lead to public humiliation. This example of his past trouble trying to remove the snow chains from his car’s tires is an example of how a singular humiliating event of almost no consequence grows into a constant source of shame for Mitty, who obsesses over the past humiliation and fantasizes pathetically about how he might avoid it in the future.
The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.
More than just an example of onomatopoeia, Mitty’s description of the pounding of the cylinders becomes a repetitive device that reveals just how intricately connected is the reality of his fantasy life and the world around him. That “ta-pocketa” sound actually describes the sound made by the car he is driving in reality. It is also the sound made by a hydroplane, an “anaesthetizer” machine in a hospital, and a menacing flame-thrower. The sound is one of the few constant links between the real world and every imaginary world created by Mitty’s fantasy life.
"Wait for me, I forgot something. I won't be a minute." She was more than a minute.
Walter has waited in the hotel lobby for a while for his wife; but just after she comes and the two are about to leave for home, she forces him to wait again while she goes to look for something. This and many other episodes demonstrate why Walter feels frustrated by his married life.
Something struck his shoulder.
Coming just after a daydream of a dangerous mission in the trenches of WWI, this sentence makes us think that Mitty has been hit by a piece of shrapnel. Ironically, the wounding force is actually just his wife, who shocks him out of his daydream.
His wife would be through at the hairdresser's in fifteen minutes, Mitty saw in looking at his watch, unless they had trouble drying it; sometimes they had trouble drying it.
We mostly hear Mitty's voice in free indirect discourse; very often, when he isn't blankly daydreaming and free-associating, his thoughts are frustrated and wittily ironic. Here he is waiting in the hotel lobby for his wife, expecting that he will have to wait longer than promised.
"Puppy biscuit."
The phrase that the Walter Mitty persona shouts in the courtroom scene, "You miserable cur!" reminds Walter, by word-association, of what he had been trying to think of before he entered that dream: namely, the type of item his wife told him to buy. Walter accidentally vocalizes this realization, leading to embarrassment when a woman overhears him.
"With any known make of gun," he said evenly, "I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand."
Mitty's personas are all characterized by some kind of masculine bravura; aside from impressive physical poses and emotional poise against the threat of danger, their words, almost like scripted lines, demonstrate a penchant for cool provocation and stalwart strength.
