What Is The Stream Of Consciousness In The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty

Sometimes when you are in a relationship, you start to wonder what your life would be like if you hadn't been with the person you are with if you aren't happy. In the short story by the author James Thurber called "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", a man named Walter Mitty daydreams about having different lifestyles away from his controlling wife. The theme of the short story is that you can be whoever you want to be as long as you are yourself. Throughout the short story, the literary terms found in "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" are characterization and conflict and they are explained in many forms. They both show how Walter's daydreams relate to his real life and how he wishes his real life was different.

James Thurber illustrates the central conflict Man vs Society in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Throughout the story, Mitty seems to have a struggle with adapting to the social norms and gender roles he is meant to play. First, Walter Mitty feels society was meant to mock him. Secondly, his feelings for his marriage are indifferent, and the gender roles appear opposite. Lastly, even his daydreams seem to have a tug of war with society.

Walter Mitty allows his wife to berate him and bring him down, holding him back from experiencing independence and adventure and danger in life, what his dreams of more than anything in life.

It is very difficult for someone to live a lie, pretending to be happy with the way things are when in all actuality they are not. Sometimes people feel helpless to change the things that are happening around them in their private lives so they seek a way out . These people often live secret lives, this is an escape route from the every day reality that they have grown to hate. In this paper I will attempt to illustrate how this hopeless reality has come to be a part of these character's lives, and what defense mechanisms the characters came up with in order to combat it.

Fantasies are what people go through on a daily basis. People love talking themselves away from reality and putting themselves into a world of their own with no limitations to where they could go. People get so into their fantasies that sometimes it may help build confidence or even cause them to lose track on what they were supposed to do or time. Fantasies become a love—hate relationship because at one point, you’re in love with the fact that you’re doing something out of your character and for your own pleasure, but it’s a hate relationship because you know that it will most likely not happen or come to an end soon enough. The short story is written by James Thurber. Mitty and his wife are on their way to do some errands, he indulges in

James Locke once said, “When ideas float in our mind without any reflection or regard of the understanding, it is that which the French call revery, our language has scarce a name for it,”. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty illustrates the escape from Walter’s mundane reality. However, the short story significantly differs from the film which can be seen in the theme, character, and conflict. In James Thurber’s

The Purpose of Life in Walter Mitty Our society is built upon the foundation of dreams: abstract concepts only a select few could think of and, because of this, our society has reached a peak in growth and development. This is the underlying message in Ben Stiller’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. It provokes the idea that the pursuit of dreams is necessary to obtain self fulfillment but is inhibited by the corporate body in contemporary society.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is an unusual short story about a man who's dreams take him away from reality. His constant dream-like state fills him with joy which the real world could never supply him with. Ultimately, the reader is stuck in the life of Walter and sees the world as he does. As the story goes on, the reader learns of how tragic this story really is. Walter is so unhappy with his current life that he has to go into trances of action-filled daydreams, he cannot do simple tasks properly, and displays characteristics of a mental disability. Because of these reasons, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a tragic story.

Although Walter Mitty is sought to be an average, middle-aged man, he goes through periods of time escaping reality through fantasies. In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, James Thurber creates Walter as an insecure husband who is degraded by his own wife. Whenever Walter feels mortified and like a failure, he falls into deep fantasies where he is portrayed as a hero who always ends up saving the day. Through the depiction of elaborate fantasies, Thurber reveals how escaping reality allows Mitty to combat the adequacy he feels in his real life. One of the major reasons Walter Mitty has severe daydreams is because his wife degrades everything he does.

Walter Mitty uses his fantasies to avoid his wife. Ferguson points out that Mr.Mitty’s dreams usually occur during or after one of his dreams(433). Walter falls into his dreams to escape his wife even though sometimes he

When escaping his dream of being a Commander on a navy hydro-plane, he was “speeding”, going over 55 mph and his wife perpetually reminded him of his wrong doing for the next minute. Another example if this is when he comes out of his doctor dream a man yells “Back it up Mac! Look out for that Buick”. He was about to crash into another car, showing that his body, absent mind, was continuing with its daily regime like a zombie. Yet in his dreams he is knows exactly what he is doing in whatever

In “Gimpel the Fool,” written by Isaac Singer, a simple man, named Gimpel, is mocked and teased relentlessly by his fellow townspeople, but as events unfold, Gimple undergoes major changes as a person. Gimpel transforms from the town’s fool into a successful business owner, and an eventually respected storyteller. In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a lonely New Yorker, Walter Mitty, is plagued by frequent daydreams that temporarily disconnect him from reality. Just as Gimpel is mocked by his townspeople for being slow and gullible, Mitty is teased by many of his fellow co-workers for his frequent daydream episodes, in which he becomes unresponsive. In order to overcome his debilitating daydreams, Mitty will have to embark on a grand

Walter Mitty had an imagination like no other. His head was filled with many exciting and new adventures. In the short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber, Walter Mitty uses his dream worlds to escape reality. He is a very unique character with many different aspects to him.

In one of Mitty’s dreams, he is a famous and esteemed doctor about to perform surgery, when the new anesthetizer starts giving way. It is said that “no one in the East…knows how to fix it” (721), yet Walter calmly approaches the machine, “pull[s] a faulty piston out…and insert[s] a fountain pen in its place” (721). The reader does not expect such complicated machinery to be fixed with a fountain pen, let alone for Mitty to be so adroit with technology. In real life, it is not feasible for him to even take care of his own car, as he has to “drive to a garage to have the chains taken off [it]” (722). The contrast of Mitty’s skills in his dreams and in real life is accentuated by the irony of his startling actions. Situational irony is also present when in Mitty’s dream, he is a fearless and well-esteemed captain, proving he has enough authority in that world to hold this title. Mitty’s delusions are very vivid to him, so he does not realize they are going to end, or that his personality really is not what he imagines it is. The readers are aware of this, making this dramatic irony. The readers know that in real life, Walter has to “be there waiting for h[is wife]” (723) whenever she comes back from the hairdresser, or wherever he drives her to. The change of roles from the fantasy to real life is colossal: Walter is no longer the one making the

The final point that emphasizes this character’s exclusive status in society in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” comes from the well-known psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.  It concerns our character’s mental health.  According to Freud, our desires and fears are repressed in the unconscious