Walter Mitty Identity

Identity functions as an ambiguous idea and topic in today’s society, as no two people possess the same identity. It differentiates one person from the next, and shapes how he or she is viewed in the outside world. Anne Sexton once said, “It doesn’t matter who my father was: it matters who I remember he was”. This quote stresses identity as a crucial aspect of a person’s legacy and its perception, which is also emphasized in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, “Young Goodman Brown”, and “A Good Man is Hard to Find”. Walter Mitty’s, Goodman Brown’s, and the Misfit’s behaviors all raise the question: how much is identity shaped by other’s opinions versus by our own? Walter Mitty expresses the side of shaping his own identity in order to go against
While he imagines his own secret identity, Mitty creates his fantasies by taking bits and pieces from his own life. After he was driving too quickly for his wife’s liking, she says to him, “I wish you’d let Dr. Renshaw look you over” (12). As a result, Mitty’s following fantasy involves him being a life-saving doctor in a hospital, with Dr. Renshaw acting as a character in it. In relation to the larger theme of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, reality versus imagination, identity plays a crucial role. Mitty employs his imagination to form a secret identity in order to go against the reality of his true identity. This truth makes its strongest point in Mitty’s final fantasy, which makes him think of himself as “Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last”
As a man living in Salem in the late seventeenth century, faith undoubtedly plays a large role in his identity. It can be assumed that Brown may not even have a real identity of his own, knowing that he visualizes himself in comparison to the other people around him. Brown’s faith depends on other people’s views, which later allows it to weaken very easily. Brown is concerned with the external view of his faith, emphasized by his hiding when he sees Goody Cloyse and the ministers on horseback, as he “crouched and stood on tip-toe, pulling aside the branches, and thrusting forth his head as far as he durst, without discerning so much as a shadow” (61). Brown’s inability to create an identity for himself and his dependence on other people’s views of him hand the power of his identity over to the external world. At the end of “Young Goodman Brown”, the reader begins to see that if Brown had possessed more strength in his own character, he would not have died with “no hopeful verse upon his tombstone; for his dying hour was gloom” (70). This quote highlights the importance of awareness of one’s identity, rather than allowing it to be shaped by the outside world. In relation to the overarching theme of the hypocrisy of society, Goodman Brown allowed his identity to be shaped by a society of hypocrites, eventually leading to a life of disillusionment and a