Summary
The story begins in medias res, right in the middle of the action—or rather, with a burst of dialogue, to be exact, spoken by the as-yet-unnamed commander of a Navy hydroplane flying through a perilous storm. The commander's crew, including a certain Lieutenant Berg, clearly express their dismay and lack of hope, while their leader, whom they reverently call "The Old Man," stands as a pillar of strength and urges them on through the maelstrom.
After the commander orders his crew to make some technical changes to their aircraft, this opening paragraph ends as it began: with vivid and dramatic dialogue as the crewmembers proclaim their trust in their leader.
Suddenly, the dialogue transitions abruptly into another exclamation—but this time, we are in an altogether different narrative frame. Walter Mitty—alias Commander—has in fact been daydreaming while driving a car, and has let his speed rise just a bit too high for Mrs. Mitty, who berates him to slow down.
Mr. Mitty snaps out of his reveries, and is surprised to find himself seated in his car, next to his wife. It turns out that they are driving towards Waterbury, Connecticut, nowhere like the storm he imagined. When he drops his wife off at the hairdresser’s, she reminds him to buy overshoes, admonishing him of the necessity, as a grown man, to keep up proper appearances; in the same way, she also inquires as to whether he has his gloves on him, which he dutifully produces from a pocket.
Mitty puts these gloves on while driving, but then hesitates at a red light in taking them off. The policeman driving behind him yells for him to get going, and he hurriedly starts moving again.
As he resumes his drive, he slips into a second daydream about being a famous British surgeon coming to operate on a wealthy banker called Wellington McMillan. After being introduced by an attractive young nurse, Dr. Mitty meets Dr. Renshaw (his doctor in real life) and a Dr. Benbow who brief him on the urgent case, telling him that they have brought in Dr. Remington and Dr. Pritchard-Mitford, two specialists. In the operating room the surgeons greet each other, and Dr. Mitty receives significant praise from his colleagues for his past work. As the other surgeons set about work, a complicated machine crucial to the operation begins to malfunction; a medical intern yells out in dismay; but Dr. Mitty, calming the intern and the rest of the team, calls for a fountain pen and deftly uses it to fix the machine.
Yet another problem arises, which this time gives the surgeons themselves great cause for doubt; and so, exasperated at his colleagues’ failure of nerve and confident of his own abilities, Dr. Mitty slips into surgical gear to take matters into his own hands.
Analysis
"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" opens dramatically, plopping us down immediately in the midst of its action. The excitement of being hurled into the middle of things is made all the more vivid by the fact that we are first confronted by dialogue coming from characters who are not immediately identified. As we progress through the story’s opening paragraph, we begin to see (what we believe to be) the whole scene: navy hydroplane, looming storm, panicked crew, valiant commander. In sum, we find ourselves in a classic adventure story, complete with dangerous circumstances, a critical moment of decision, and a brave hero. However, it is precisely this conventional expectation that the author, James Thurber, plays with in order to shock the reader and thereby achieve a reading pleasure of an entirely different kind than the usual excitements of an adventure plot.
Once we have swept past the first paragraph, we quickly come to understand that the story is a metafictional tale about a man with an overactive imagination. But the fact that the adventure scenes are dreamed up by Walter Mitty does not diminish their quality or power. By adding this metafictional element, the author depicts not only a powerful scene, but the act of imagining it, as well. Note in particular the abundance of technical details about the hydroplane that we are given, even where they do not directly affect the plot. These details constitute what French critic Roland Barthes called a "reality effect“: while not meaningful in themselves—as a jumble of machinery names and numbers of unfamiliar magnitude and measure—they paint by implication a reality that lends itself to detailed observation and is complete in itself.
Coincidentally, Walter Mitty's title as "Commander” and the nickname his crew gives him, "The Old Man," function as key details that anchor Mitty's character within the reality conjured by the other inanimate details. One could easily imagine different ways in which Walter could have narrated himself in his dream, or the different ways the frame story's narrator could have represented Walter's imagined self; most important to consider would be the fact that Mitty's name does not occur in the first fantasy, whereas he is named as "Mitty" in all the other stories. By this same principle, the name "Mrs. Mitty" gives the reader a strong double-sensation: we hear the name of a married woman, which doesn't seem to fit in at all in the scene we have just settled into, while at the same time, the "Mitty" indicates to us that we are getting to the story promised by the title.
Take a look back at these opening paragraphs of the story after reading it in its entirety, and you will find the beginning much stranger, much richer in implication, than it seems at first. Without any explicit explanation along the lines of "Walter Mitty awoke from his day dream" or "Walter Mitty realized he had been dreaming," the story transitions between the world of Mitty’s imagination and the world of his real life. It is precisely this shock, this bewildered recognition of the contradiction between imagined reality and actual reality, that gives the story its nearly century-long freshness.
There is another strange effect that this first paragraph sets up. Remember that the name "Walter Mitty" is not introduced until the third paragraph, after an entirely differently scene featuring "The Commander." In this sense—and against the conventional interpretation that the beginning is simply a representation of Walter Mitty’s daydream—we could say that the character Walter Mitty emerges from The Commander, not vice versa. The risk is that once the reader "knows" the frame story of Walter Mitty the dreamer (which one could just as well learn from someone's summary of the story as from reading it oneself!), they immediately read "The Commander" as "Walter Mitty." Though this may be true in an "empirical" sense, to read the story in such a way is to miss the literary magic of metamorphosis—the kind of effect that—at least since Ovid—great literature has always achieved. Indeed, we can see “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”—with its vivid portrayal of the act of imagining—as precisely a story about the power of the imagination.
