Saturday, November 7, 2015

What is the structure of the story "The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty" by James Thurber?

This story vascillates between the everyday humdrum life of Water Mitty, the hen-pecked husband sterotype, and the extravagant adventures he lives in his daydreams. Mitty flits in and out of reality, his daydreams concocted by a stream of consciousness association triggered by the sputtering of his car's exhaust pipe, a pair of gloves, and finally a freshly lit cigarette. In such a way this docile "hubby" gets to be the captain of an icebreaker, a famous surgeon, a defendent in a murder trial and finally a fighter pilot taken captive distaining a firing squad. Mitty's imagination is his "second life," which nurtures his deflated ego and helps hims escape the insufferable mediocrity of his existence.


If you do a graph of the plot line of this story, it would look very much like a cardiograph printout, with the steady horizontal line of Mitty's real life intermittantly broken by the highs and lows of his "virtual" existence.

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