Summary
Just as Captain Mitty is setting out dauntlessly from the dugout to bomb the German ammunition dump and saying farewell to the sergeant he is leaving behind, we hear that "Something struck his shoulder." It isn't shrapnel from an enemy shell; it is Mrs. Mitty, who has returned from her appointment at the hairdresser's to meet her husband at the hotel where they usually rendezvous. She complains that she has been looking all around the building for him and that he should not have sat in the chair, whose size had concealed his figure and made him difficult to find. Mitty, still half-dreaming, says "Things close in," thinking perhaps of the box barrage of his previous dream; Mrs. Mitty, not understanding, says "What?" but without any desire to understand, simply plows ahead in her train of thought and asks him whether he has gotten the things she told him to get: the puppy biscuits and the overshoes. Seeing that he is carrying the latter in a box, she berates him for not having put them on in the store.
"I was thinking … Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking?" he replies, for once standing up to her. This prompts a similarly uninterested response from her: "I'm going to take your temperature when I get you home." They leave the hotel to go to the parking lot, but when they reach the front of the drugstore, Mrs. Mitty asks Walter to wait while she goes to get something. She says that she will only be gone a minute, but ends up taking longer. Mitty lights up a cigarette while waiting. It starts to rain and sleet, making things miserable for the man leaning up against the drugstore wall.
At this moment, he shifts his posture to stand up straight and heroic, and goes so far as to say out loud the lines of his final fantasy: "To hell with the handkerchief." He is imagining himself standing before a firing squad about to meet his end, which he does so with heroic pride and disdain. He flicks away his cigarette and awaits his fate, which is left undescribed.
Analysis
In his description of the transition from Mitty's penultimate fantasy back to reality, Thurber demonstrates again—as he has, in different ways, in each of the other transitions—the vividness and entertaining quality of interwoven scenes and dialogues. Here is the ending of Mitty's daydream of being a World War I captain and its transition into Mrs. Mitty's discovery of her husband sitting as though hidden in a hotel lobby chair:
"Walter Mitty walked to the door of the dugout humming 'Auprès de Ma Blonde.' He turned and waved to the sergeant. 'Cheerio!' he said ....
Something struck his shoulder. 'I've been looking all over this hotel for you,'' said Mrs. Mitty. 'Why do you have to hide in this old chair? How did you expect me to find you?'" (549).
Although Mitty's previous scenarios have involved (beautiful) female companions for his avatar, it is really only in this dream that the Mitty character makes some kind of explicitly amorous reference; the soldier's song that Captain Mitty hums, "Auprès de Ma Blonde," was written by a French soldier captured during the 17th century Franco-Dutch War and became popular among soldiers through the time of World War I. It speaks from the perspective of a soldier who longs for his girl back home. The refrain translates as:
"Next to my blonde
How good it is, it is, it is,
Next to my blonde
How good it is to sleep!"
Although it may seem like the title of this song is just another detail dropped in by Thurber and/or Mitty to lend the latter's fantasies a greater sense of realism, one might read in the soldier's song's the duality between the amorous longing of thinking of one's woman and the prospect of imprisonment or death that is faced by men in danger. The soldier's longing is not unlike the dreams that Mitty has; both project their hopes and selves out of a present situation in which they feel deprived and entrapped into a vision of such complete fulfillment that love and death, seemingly opposites, would come together.
The (already lost) masculine ideal represented by Mitty's successive dreams is expressed most clearly when Mitty imagines being violent and/or amorous. Reading through the successive fantasies, the reader begins to pick up on the repeated motifs and gets from them a sense of the identity of Mitty as their creator. But Thurber demands an interpretive leap of sorts in this little detail of the song at the end of the penultimate fantasy to understand how, as though drawn by a force of fate or necessity, as opposed to blind chance, Mitty's stories tend towards death. As we see in the final fantasy, which is almost without action or other characters—Mitty's masculine fantasizing thus reduced to its essentially egoistic core, by which all other characters are merely so much ornamentation and support—the idealism that his previous personas had embodied does indeed end up in simple death.
It is also no coincidence that death, in its nearly ungraspable absoluteness, should find representation in a prose narrative in the form of song lyrics. This is a common trope in literature, for example in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain in which the protagonist Hans Castorp has a prescient experience of death in listening to "Der Lindenbaum" ("The Linden Tree"), a song by Franz Schubert about a lonely traveler thinking about a beloved linden tree; for Mann, as for Thurber to a lesser extent, music has a kind of pure and direct emotional force that narrative lacks. Of course, the advantage of prose narrative is that it can weave all sorts of different material and genres together—which is exactly what Thurber does so skillfully in this brief allusion to the song.
By tracing the reference to its source and interpreting the different elements of the story it brings together, we can appreciate the way that the author ties together the otherwise disparate subliminal threads of amorous prowess and capacity for violence.
