Character Analysis Of Walter Mitty

The short story of Walter Mitty, an average American man, follows a day in his incredibly ordinary life. Mitty, overwhelmed by the boredom and unsatisfactory conditions of his own life, uses “daydreams” to escape his poor reality and indulge himself in one where he thrives and lives excitedly. These dreams, where he is an adventurous, charismatic hero couldn’t be more contrary to the way he truly lives; timidly, unrespected, and unimportant. His fantasy allows him to get through his day. Mitty escapes his actuality governed by his pathetic life and domineering wife by dreaming of a different identity that is quite the opposite to his reality.

Daydreaming is an activity all humans enjoy. Some people day dream to enter their perfect reality and

In reality Mitty is desperately lonely, avoids speaking to anyone, and mostly refuses to share his inner thoughts with others. Mitty dreams of feeling equal enough to his peers where he can freely express himself and fit in within a group of people. His wife makes it difficult for him to find this satisfaction by her constant belittlement and control, but Mitty furthers this by isolating himself within his dream realm and allowing himself to hide from confrontation with others. Throughout the short story Mitty only speaks out once to Mrs. Mitty with what resembles an intelligent confrontation, “Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking?”, which Mrs. Mitty brushes off as if it were child’s nonsense (Thurber, 27). Even when Mitty attempted to find companionship and confess his feelings he is met with annoyance and callous. This only bottles Mitty up more and pushes him further within his dream-scape, and as states by George Cheatham, in the end, “It’s not his wife who dooms him, but his own perverse isolation,” meaning that yes, Mitty was met with solitariness, but he allowed it to get the better of him and divulged himself into even more isolation (Cheatham, 3). Within his dreams he aimed to combat this loneliness by musing himself into someone else who excited

Mitty doesn’t demand respect in his real life because he doesn’t think he deserves it. Mitty isn’t a surgeon or a commander, he is just a regular man who can’t even be trusted by his wife with more than two errands. He is constantly made fun of or judged by strangers along with his own wife, and never stands up for himself in any instance. It is these moments where Walter’s dreams usually begin, almost as if Walter is coping most with the fact that he is unrespected by all he comes into contact with and using his dreams to immediately escape this specific feeling (Ferguson