With his own brand of wit, irony, and humorous distortions of speech, James Thurber creates a comic Everyman in Walter Mitty. Mild and submissive, Mitty dreams of being heroic and non-conforming, but he cannot quite pull his character up to the necessary level and is frustrated in his society and is berated by his wife. So, he compensates for his meek nature by means of his imagination.
Thurber's narrative begins with
- Mitty's imagines that he is the commander of a Navy hydroplane, a SN202, that fights its way through an approaching hurricane, but Mrs. Mitty interrupts, scolding him, "Not so fast! You're driving too fast!"
- As Mitty drops off his wife at the shop where she gets her hair done, she orders him to buy overshoes and to wear his gloves. Walter Mitty puts on his gloves, but after she is gone, he defiantly removes them. However, when a policeman yells at him, "Pick it up, brother!" as the green light comes on at the intersection where he has stopped, Mitty quickly puts his gloves back on his hands, and steps so hard on the accelerator that the car lurches forward.
- After driving aimlessly around for a while, Mitty drives past a hospital, and another daydream takes hold of him: In this dream, Mitty is a top surgeon who must operate on a millionaire banker and close friend of President Roosevelt. The heroic Dr. Mitty is able to repair a malfunctioning machine by removing the faulty piston and replacing it with a fountain pen.
Just as he is ready to operate, Dr. Mitty is pulled from this daydream and reduced to his meek self by a parking lot attendant: "Back it up. Mac! Look out for that Buick!" Shaken by the scolding, Mitty becomes nervous and forgets to leave the key in the ignition, only to be scolded again by the insolent attendant. - Then, as he tries to remember what the other item is that he is supposed to purchase besides the overshoes, Mitty hears a newsboy calling out a headline about a Waterbury trial. Now Mitty is the defendant on the witness stand who is handed a gun by the District Attorney. "This is my Webley-Vickers 50.80," Mitty says quietly. When it is insinuated that he has shot someone, Mitty fearlessly states that although his left arm is in a sling, he could have shot Gregory Fitzhurst with his left hand. When the District Attorney strikes a pretty young woman, Mitty defends her, calling the attorney, "You miserable cur." Suddenly, he is shaken from his reverie by remembering--"Puppy biscuit" that it was dog biscuits that he is supposed to also purchase. Then he walks into the grocery store to make a purchase.
- Mitty leaves the store and goes to the hotel where he is to wait for his wife. He picks up an old copy of a World War I magazine, Liberty, and regards it. Another daydream begins in which he is Capt. Mitty, a pilot whose mission is to fly near a squadron of German planes. As he waves goodbye to a sergeant, Mitty hears the voice of his wife asking if he bought the shoes and remembered the puppy biscuits. She complains that she has looked all over the hotel lobby for him.
- Mitty tells her in brief defiance, "I was thinking....Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking?" But, his wife merely answers that she is going to take his temperature when they arrive home. As they leave the hotel and pass a drugstore, Mrs. Mitty tells Walter to wait there as she buys something. Mitty leans against the wall of the drugstore, imagining that he is before a firing squad.
"To hell with the handkerchief"....He faced the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last.
This is the end of the story, so Mitty has no real experience after this action.
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