Walter Mitty's Short Story 'Living A Double Life'
Living a Double Life
Desiré P. Edmond
ENG 125 - Introduction to Literature
Instructor: Irene Robles-Huerta
December 16, 2013
Living a Double Life
In James Thurber’s short story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” Walter Mitty uses his dreams as a means of escaping and to convey his feelings of irritation and unhappiness. When an individual daydreams, they have the tendency of escaping the trivial aspects of life and attaining a sense of freedom from their real world situations. In the usage of the literary elements of character, setting, and symbolism, the author contributes to the larger narrative theme of fantasy and reality in showing how Walter Mitty leads a double life in the world of make believe by daydreaming.
A theme is created when a story focuses on a general principal idea, forms it in a distinctive fashion, and makes that …show more content…
Symbols are something that has a precise distinctiveness but really means something different; it is commonly recognized and has been progressed over an extensive length of time (Clugston, 2010). The gloves and sling are two of the main symbols in this short story. Mitty is told by his wife that he should be wearing his gloves and submissively, he puts them on at her bitter request. However, once she gets out of the car, he takes them right back off, establishing his own manliness and capability to make his own decisions. Unfortunately, he quickly puts them on again after being scolded by a police officer for driving too slowly. As he daydreams of becoming Dr. Mitty, the prominent surgeon, he once again removes the gloves. The gloves and the sling share a similar representation of Mitty’s power and the rise and fall of his situational control. In this symbolic relationship, Mitty is appreciated, strong-minded, well-liked and authoritative in his imagination; whereas in reality, he is henpecked, clumsy, unskilled and ineffective (Cheatham,
Desiré P. Edmond
ENG 125 - Introduction to Literature
Instructor: Irene Robles-Huerta
December 16, 2013
Living a Double Life
In James Thurber’s short story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” Walter Mitty uses his dreams as a means of escaping and to convey his feelings of irritation and unhappiness. When an individual daydreams, they have the tendency of escaping the trivial aspects of life and attaining a sense of freedom from their real world situations. In the usage of the literary elements of character, setting, and symbolism, the author contributes to the larger narrative theme of fantasy and reality in showing how Walter Mitty leads a double life in the world of make believe by daydreaming.
A theme is created when a story focuses on a general principal idea, forms it in a distinctive fashion, and makes that …show more content…
Symbols are something that has a precise distinctiveness but really means something different; it is commonly recognized and has been progressed over an extensive length of time (Clugston, 2010). The gloves and sling are two of the main symbols in this short story. Mitty is told by his wife that he should be wearing his gloves and submissively, he puts them on at her bitter request. However, once she gets out of the car, he takes them right back off, establishing his own manliness and capability to make his own decisions. Unfortunately, he quickly puts them on again after being scolded by a police officer for driving too slowly. As he daydreams of becoming Dr. Mitty, the prominent surgeon, he once again removes the gloves. The gloves and the sling share a similar representation of Mitty’s power and the rise and fall of his situational control. In this symbolic relationship, Mitty is appreciated, strong-minded, well-liked and authoritative in his imagination; whereas in reality, he is henpecked, clumsy, unskilled and ineffective (Cheatham,