Summary
Walter Mitty's fantasy about being a surgeon is interrupted just as he starts to put on his surgical gloves—in reality, Mitty has been trying to make his way in a parking lot and in doing so has nearly crashed into another car. The parking attendant calls out to him. After an awkward attempt to back out of the parking lot, Mitty ends up delivering the car to the attendant, but has to be given another reminder, this time to leave his keys in the car.
Walking away from the parking lot, Mitty feels painfully embarrassed by the encounter, which makes him recall a time when he tried to take off the tire chains on his car by himself and ended up inadvertently getting the chains stuck, wrapped around the axles of his wheels. Unable to take them off himself, he had to call a garageman and endure the latter’s smug smile at the ridiculousness of the situation. Mitty begins to think about wearing his arm in a sling as an excuse for having to take the car to the garage every time he wants to take off the chains, as his wife orders him to do.
He remembers that he is supposed to be looking for overshoes, and sets off in search of a pair. He gets them and then tries to remember the other item his wife told him to get; in the midst of this contemplation, a newsboy runs by him yelling out the news about a trial in town.
This acts as a stimulus to Mitty's imagination, and he finds himself plunged into yet another fantasy: this time he is a crack shot on trial for the murder of a certain Gregory Fitzhurst. Facing off calmly on the witness stand against a devious district attorney who seeks to convict him, Mitty does not try to conceal his own prowess with pistols. The district attorney hands him a piece of evidence, the gun used at the crime; Mitty nonchalantly identifies it as his own Webley-Vickers 50.80 pistol.
The district attorney follows up by speaking to Mitty's expert skill at shooting firearms, trying to make a convincing argument that Mitty was the murderer. Mitty's attorney shouts an objection, pointing out that on the night of the fourteen of July, the time of the murder, Mitty's right arm, i.e. his gun arm, was injured and held in a sling; and therefore that Mitty would have been unable to shoot a firearm, despite his skill. This objection stirs up heated contention between the two attorneys, which Mitty, with great charisma, silences by coolly claiming that he could have shot a man from three hundred feet with any kind of gun, even with his left hand. The courtroom is sent into a high pitch of excitement by this statement, leading to a beautiful dark-haired woman, presumably Mitty's lover, flinging herself into his arms; the district attorney hits her; and in return, Mitty lands a solid punch on the man's chin, saying "You miserable cur!"
This final line from the fantasy makes Mitty suddenly remember that his wife had asked him to look for puppy biscuits. Unintentionally saying "puppy biscuits" out loud, Mitty is ridiculed by a woman passing him. He goes into a store and buys the biscuits, and then goes to the hotel to wait for his wife to come out from the hairdresser's. While sitting in a chair in the lobby he picks up a copy of Liberty magazine and reads the title of an article: "Can Germany Conquer the World Through the Air?"
This prompts a fantasy of himself as the English or American Captain Mitty in the midst of World War I, on the front lines fighting against the Germans. Speaking with a sergeant who is rattled by the constant artillery shelling around them, Mitty fearlessly downs some brandy and volunteers to pilot a plane to bomb an enemy ammunition dump. He leaves the dugout and heads out into danger.
Analysis
In his third and fourth fantasies, we see Mitty in two other highly masculine, highly clichéd roles: a hitman and a soldier. Although his first persona, that of the hydroplane commander, was in the Navy, the conflict that he faced was not as violent as that of the latter two, both of whose work has to do directly with killing other human beings. This violence is depicted not as messy or immoral, but glorious and charismatic; in both cases, Mitty’s character maintains the same level of mature calm throughout the most trying situations, whether being attacked verbally by the accusations of a district attorney or physically by the shelling of German guns. This attitude comes, of course, from the first two fantasies, and more essentially, as a mirror image of Mitty's actual sensitivity and the relative ease with which he finds himself in embarrassing, petty situations—such as happened earlier with the policeman at the light, in this section with the parking attendant, and in the past, as we learn, with the garageman.
Here we might notice a certain contradiction, whereby Mitty is usually embarrassed by other men doing their jobs, even though his wife is, at least in the reality narrated in the story, the character who most explicitly criticizes and even denigrates Mitty. A crucial element in Mitty's sense of emasculation (and hence his need to supplement his feeling of being a man with fantasies of being a hero) is his lack of confidence—less in front of women than in front of other men. Mitty of course also loses face before the woman who overhears him muttering "puppy biscuit" to himself, but we hear much more about his consternation with the garageman's smug grin than with her remarking to her male companion what a strange man Mitty must be.
An interesting detail that arises in this section, and this section only, is that Mitty fantasizes about something not within the frame of one of his highly fictionalized dreams, but something that he might actually do: namely, put his arm in a sling so as to have an excuse for not being able to take his tire chains off himself. This fantasy serves more or less the same kind of supplementary purpose described above: he wants to look good in front of other men. However, in this case, because he is only imagining himself in actuality, with his actual (in)capabilities, he implicitly admits that there is no way he could prove his masculinity; all he can do is to hide his emasculation with a false wound that does not compromise his masculinity. This arm in the sling, however, really functions as a kind of doubling of his emasculation, or even an unconscious acceptance of the fact that he is in some way disabled.
We should also note that this fantasy is narrated as something that Mitty himself is imagining, as opposed to the vignettes, which are narrated as though objectively—whether that means that they seem to "actually happen" in some reality, or that they are projected outside of him like a film on a screen. Indeed, Thurber could well have chosen to narrate this bit about going with an arm in a sling to the garageman just as he narrated Mitty's other fantasies. His choice not to do so suggests that in this case, Mitty is having a different sort of psychological experience. As described above, this is a fantasy, but one which has more to do with a realistic (if ridiculous) plan, as opposed to an utterly unrealistic daydream.
In the former, Mitty is bound by all the things he cannot do; in the latter, there is no limit to what Mitty can do; or, to be more precise, we never hear about any of his weaknesses or downfalls in the hero-fantasies, and so they simply do not enter into our considerations of his character. However, the irony of the story is that when Mitty's real-life characteristics, of which we are aware from the "actual" narrative, are covered over in the daydreams, we can still see them underneath the cool, heroic characters he inhabits. The absurd heights of expertise and bravery that his characters manifest gives us the strong sense that Mitty is actively concealing and repressing certain parts of himself. This complex psychology reveals at once the workings of Mitty's mind, the subtlety with which Thurber weaves these in his multi-layered narrative, and the actual ethical significance of understanding the way that any other (real) person is, to varying degrees, caught up in a tension between reality and fiction.
