He put them on, but after she had turned and gone into the building and he had driven on to a red light, he took them off again. Walter Mitty is neither exciting nor successful in his everyday life.
The theme of success and failure is examined through Mitty’s inability to live a fulfilling external life, which causes him to retreat to an internal life full of images of conquest.
Mitty's second daydream is of being a famous surgeon, operating on a millionaire banker. Walter Mitty reached in a pocket and brought out the gloves. What Is The Theme Of The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty. In reality, he unconsciously begins to drive faster, and his wife startles him out of the dream, asking him why he is driving so fast. Mitty's first daydream is of flying a Navy plane through a terrible storm. Mitty's motivation is to escape his life by day dreaming. Walter Mitty was a a fictional character in James Thurber’s short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, published in 1941.Mitty was a meek, mild man with a vivid fantasy life: in a few dozen paragraphs he imagined himself a wartime pilot, an emergency-room surgeon, and a devil-may-care killer. His daydreams all have him as a successful, courageous, heroic individual, who is called in to save the day.Ĭorrespondingly, what motivates Walter Mitty? He spends a good deal of his time imagining that he is someone else. Subsequently, question is, what type of character is Walter Mitty? Walter Mitty, the main character in "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," is a daydreamer.
The most famous of Thurber's inept male protagonists, the character is considered "the archetype for dreamy, hapless, Thurber Man". The American Heritage Dictionary defines a Walter Mitty as "an ordinary often ineffectual person who indulges in fantastic daydreams of personal triumphs". Walter Mitty is mentally stable, but suffers from PTSD Post Traumatic Stress Disorder can be described as an anxiety disorder that is characterized by reliving a psychological traumatic situation through nightmares and flashbacks, even when there is no present harm to the individual.Īccordingly, what does it mean to call someone a Walter Mitty?