The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

First published in the New Yorker in 1939, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is James Thurber’s short story about the flamboyant fantasy life of a timid suburban Everyman. A gentle satire of the human imagination (among other things), the story struck an immediate and lasting chord in the midcentury American imagination and is widely regarded as a comic masterpiece. Its distinctive mixture of pathos and parody made it one of the most anthologized short stories of the 20th century, adding both a new archetype to the culture and a noun to the English language: Merriam Webster defines “Walter Mitty” as “a commonplace unadventurous person who seeks escape from reality through daydreaming.”

Unlike most classic fiction, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” portrays little or no character arc. The story’s action, which juxtaposes Mitty’s fantasized exploits with his mundane day-to-day life, generates no significant change or self-reflection in its milquetoast protagonist: The story’s close finds him much the same person as he was at the start. Along the way, however, Thurber explores numerous themes, which are no less humorous, in his wry treatment, for their essential seriousness. These include the siren-song of cultural tropes; the emasculation and/or infantilization of modern man; marital discord; and the ambiguous nature of the imagination.

This guide refers to the story as it appeared in The Thurber Carnival (Harper and Row), a selection of Thurber’s stories and sketches that first appeared in 1945.

The story opens in medias res—mid-action and without preamble—in the heightened style of a pulp adventure: “‘We’re going through!’ The Commander’s voice was like thin ice breaking” (Paragraph 1). An immense “eight-engined Navy hydroplane” hurdles into the maw of a gathering storm, piloted by the Commander, who coolly ignores his lieutenant’s fearful protests that a hurricane is brewing, while his stout-hearted crew looks on admiringly: “‘The Old Man’ll get us through,’ they said to one another. ‘The Old Man ain’t afraid of Hell!’” (Paragraph 1).

The scene ends abruptly, and the next passage reveals that it was all a daydream—the idle reverie of a man driving into town, his wife jarring him back to reality by urging him to drive more slowly. The man is Walter Mitty, and for a moment he does not recognize his wife beside him: “She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a woman who had yelled at him in a crowd” (Paragraph 2). Nevertheless, he quickly obeys her order. Discerning that Mitty has been lost in thought, his wife says, “It’s one of your days” and suggests he let his doctor look him over (Paragraph 3).

In the town of Waterbury, Mitty drops his wife off at a beauty salon. Before she leaves, she tells him to buy overshoes (galoshes), overruling his meek protest with a reminder that he’s not young like he used to be. Lastly, she scolds him for not wearing his gloves. (It is a cold day.) To placate her, he puts on the gloves, then pulls them off again once she turns to leave—only to hastily put them back on minutes later when a policeman yells at him for idling at a green light.

After some time driving nowhere in particular, Mitty heads for a parking lot. When he passes a hospital, it inspires another daydream that, like the first, begins without preamble: Mitty, a world-renowned surgeon, is told by a “pretty nurse” that a millionaire banker, Wellington McMillan, is desperately ill. They are joined by one of the attending physicians, Dr. Renshaw (Mitty’s real-life doctor), who looks exhausted and beside himself. He tells Mitty that the surgical team is having “the devil’s own time” with McMillan, that his condition is extremely grave (“Obstreosis of the ductal tract. Tertiary.”), and that Mitty’s help would be a godsend; “Glad to,” Mitty responds lightly (Paragraph 5).

In the operating room, the attending surgeons, together with two specialists who have flown in from New York and London just for the operation, all defer to Mitty, who begins by repairing a “huge, complicated” anesthesia machine that has gone haywire, by way of an ingenious improvisation: Without losing a second, he replaces a “faulty piston” with a fountain pen, declaring, “That will hold for ten minutes” (Paragraph 6). However, the patient’s condition has meanwhile deteriorated: “Coreopsis” has set in. Mitty accedes to his colleagues’ desperate pleas and calmly draws on his surgical gloves.

At this point—again, before the daydream’s climax—Mitty’s fantasy is broken, this time by a parking-lot attendant who berates him for driving in the wrong lane and almost hitting another car. Mitty responds with a diffident “Gee. Yeh,” surrendering his car to the attendant, who parks it with “insolent skill.” Mitty is shaken by the attendant’s lack of respect, and, walking down Main Street, recalls a similar humiliation, when he had to rely on a “young, grinning garageman” to untangle the snow chains from the axles of his car (Paragraph 8). Ever since, his wife has made him take the car to a garage to have the chains removed. Now, Mitty formulates a plan to avoid future embarrassment: The next time he has to bring his car in, he’ll put a sling on his right arm so the mechanics think he’s seeking their help not because he’s incompetent but because he’s physically unable to do the job himself.

After buying his galoshes, Mitty struggles to remember the other item his wife reminded him to buy. This failure of memory, coupled with a passing newsboy’s cry about a local courtroom trial, sparks Mitty’s third fantasy of the day, which begins with a timeworn trope from pulp fiction: “‘Perhaps this will refresh your memory.’ The District Attorney suddenly thrust a heavy automatic at the quiet figure on the witness stand” (Paragraph 10).

Mitty is the man on trial—and, to the gasps of spectators, he placidly says the murder weapon, a “Webley-Vickers 50.80,” is his. The District Attorney presses him on this admission: “‘You are a crack shot with any sort of firearm, I believe?’” (Paragraph 10). Mitty’s lawyer objects that his client’s right arm was in a sling on the night of the murder, but Mitty gestures for silence, then negates his own alibi: “With any known make of gun […] I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand” (Paragraph 10). As the courtroom turns to an uproar, a beautiful dark-haired young woman leaps into Mitty’s arms, only to be struck at “savagely” by the DA. Without rising, Mitty punches the District Attorney squarely on the jaw and calls him a “miserable cur!”

The last word jogs Mitty’s memory of his shopping list, ending his daydream: “Puppy biscuit,” he says aloud. A passing woman overhears him and laughs. Mitty hurries to a grocery store but cannot remember the brand of the biscuits he wants, only the inane tagline.

Mitty has arranged to meet up with his wife at the lobby of a local hotel. Her salon visits often run over, but he knows she’ll be expecting him to wait as he always does. In the lobby, he picks up an old issue of Liberty magazine, and its photos of bombed-out streets launch him again into daydream, this time as a dauntless WWI pilot facing impossible odds. As in the first fantasy, a worshipful underling protests his wild daring: “It takes two to handle that bomber and the Archies are pounding hell out of the air” (Paragraph 13). But the mission must be flown: An artillery barrage is “closing in” on them. Mitty coolly fortifies himself with brandy while the younger officer praises his capacity. He leaves for his deadly mission with perfect sangfroid, humming a romantic French tune.

Something strikes his shoulder: his wife’s hand. Accused of “hiding” from her in a big chair, he responds confusedly, “Things close in” (Paragraph 14). She then chides him for not wearing his new galoshes. Mitty pushes back, “Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking?” (Paragraph 14). His wife interprets his self-assertiveness as a symptom of illness and remarks that, once back home, she’ll be checking his temperature. As they exit the building, the revolving doors emit a “faintly derisive whistling sound” (Paragraph 15). On the way to the parking lot, Mrs. Mitty notices that she has forgotten something and ducks into a drugstore, forcing her husband to wait outside in the falling sleet. He lights a cigarette, kindling a final fantasy: a military-style execution.

His back to a wall, the condemned Mitty contemptuously refuses the blindfold, accepting his fate without fear or apology: “Then, with that faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last” (Paragraph 15).