ANALYZE AMERICAN SHORT STORY

“ THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY 1939 “

By James Thurber
Final Paper Assignment of Textual Reading Subject

Lecturer: Diyah Iis Andriani S.S.,M.Pd.

Arranged By:

Rabitha Halula Kamal ( 231010600739 )

ENGLISH LITERATURE
FACULTY OF LETTERS
PAMULANG UNIVERSITY
2023
 PREFACE

First of all, thanks to Allah SWT because of the help of Allah, writer
finished writing the paper entitled "Analyze THE SECRET LIFE OF
WALTER MITTY" right in the calculated time.

The purpose in writing this paper is to fulfill the assignment that

given by Ms. Diyah Iis Adriani S.S, M.Pd. as lecturer in Textual Reading
major.

In arranging this paper, the writer trully get lots challenges and
obstructions but with help of many indiviuals, those obstructions could
passed. writer also realized there are still many mistakes in process of
writing this paper.

because of that, the writer says thank you to all individuals who
helps in the process of writing this paper. hopefully allah replies all helps
and bless you all.the writer realized tha this paper still imperfect in
arrangment and the content. then the writer hope the criticism from the
readers can help the writer in perfecting the next paper.last but not the least
Hopefully, this paper can helps the readers to gain more knowledge about
Textual Reading major.

Depok, November 1st, 2023

The Writer
 TABLE OF CONTENT

I. PREFACE.........................................................................................

II. SHORT STORY............................................................................

III. PLOT SUMMARY.....................................................................

IV. CHARACTERS & CHARACTERIZATION..........................

A. Characters...................................................................................

B. Characterization.........................................................................

V. REFERENCES...............................................................................

VI. AUTHOR’S BIODATA..............................................................

VII. WRITER’S BIODATA...............................................................

 SHORT STORY
“The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber ( 1939 )
“We’er going through!”The Commander’s voice was like thin ice
breaking. He wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap
pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye.“We can’t make it, sir.It’s
spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me.”“I’m not asking you, Lieutenant
Berg,”said the Commander.“Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to
8,500! We’re going through!”The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-
pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.The Commander stared at the ice
forming on the pilot window. He walked over and twisted a row of
complicated dials.“Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!” he shouted.“Switch on No. 8
auxiliary!” repeated Lieutenant Berg.“Full strength in No. 3 turret!”shouted
the Commander.“Full strength in No. 3 turret!”The crew, bending to their
various tasks in the huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at
each other and grinned.“The Old Man’ll get us through,”they said to one
another.“The Old Man ain’t afraid of Hell!”. . .

“Not so fast! You’re driving too fast!”said Mrs. Mitty.“What are you
driving so fast for?”

“Hmm?”said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat beside

him, with shocked astonishment. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a
strange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd.“You were up to fifty-
five,”she said.“You know I don’t like to go more than forty. You were up to
fifty-five.”Walter Mitty drove on toward Waterbury in silence, the roaring
of the SN202 through the worst storm in twenty years of Navy flying fading
in the remote, intimate airways of his mind.“You’re tensed up again,”said
Mrs. Mitty. “It’s one of your days.I wish you’d let Dr. Renshaw look you
over.”

Walter Mitty stopped the car in front of the building where his wife
went to have her hair done.“Remember to get those overshoes while I’m
having my hair done,”she said.“I don’t need overshoes,”said Mitty. She put
her mirror back into her bag.“We’ve been all through that,”she said,
getting out of the car.“You’re not a young man any longer.” He raced the
engine a little.“Why don’t you wear your gloves? Have you lost your
gloves?” Walter Mitty reached in a pocket and brought out the gloves. 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.“Pick it up, brother!”snapped
a cop as the light changed, and Mitty hastily pulled on his gloves and
lurched ahead. He drove around the streets aimlessly for a time, and then he
drove past the hospital on his way to the parking lot.

. . .“It’s the millionaire banker,Wellington McMillan,”said the

pretty nurse.“Yes?”said Walter Mitty, removing his gloves slowly.“Who has
the case?”“Dr. Renshaw and Dr. Benbow, but there are two specialists here,
Dr. Remington from New York and Dr. Pritchard-Mitford from London. He
flew over.” A door opened down a long, cool corridor and Dr. Renshaw
came out. He looked distraught and haggard.“Hello, Mitty,” he said.“We’re
having the devil’s own time with McMillan, the millionaire banker and
close personal friend of Roosevelt. Obstreosis of the ductal
tract.Tertiary.Wish you’d take a look at him.”“Glad to,”said Mitty.

In the operating room there were whispered introductions: “Dr.

Remington, Dr. Mitty. Dr. Pritchard-Mitford, Dr. Mitty.”“I’ve read your
book on streptothricosis,”said Pritchard-Mitford, shaking hands.“A brilliant
performance, sir.”“Thank you,”said Walter Mitty.“Didn’t know you were in
the States, Mitty,” grumbled Remington.“Coals to Newcastle, bringing
Mitford and me up here for a tertiary.”“You are very kind,”said Mitty. A
huge, complicated machine, connected to the operating table, with many
tubes and wires, began at this moment to go pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.“The
new anaesthetizer is giving way!”shouted an interne.“There is no one in the
East who knows how to fix it!” “Quiet, man!”said Mitty, in a low, cool
voice. He sprang to the machine, which was now going pocketa-pocketa-
queep-pocketa-queep. He began fingering delicately a row of glistening
dials.“Give me a fountain pen!” he snapped. Someone handed him a
fountain pen. He pulled a faulty piston out of the machine and inserted the
pen in its place.“That will hold for ten minutes,” he said.“Get on with the
operation.” A nurse hurried over and whispered to Renshaw, and Mitty saw
the man turn pale.“Coreopsis has set in,”said Renshaw nervously.“If you
would take over, Mitty?”Mitty looked at him and at the craven figure of
Benbow, who drank, and at the grave, uncertain faces of the two great
specialists.“If you wish,” he said.They slipped a white gown on him; he
adjusted a mask and drew on thin gloves; nurses handed him shining . . .

“Back it up, Mac! Look out for that Buick!”Walter Mitty jammed on
the brakes.“Wrong lane, Mac,”said the parking-lot attendant, looking at
Mitty closely.“Gee. Yeh,” muttered Mitty. He began cautiously to back out
of the lane marked “Exit Only.”“Leave her sit there,”said the attendant.“I’ll
put her away.”Mitty got out of the car.“Hey, better leave the key.”“Oh,”said
Mitty, handing the man the ignition key.The attendant vaulted into the car,
backed it up with insolent skill, and put it where it belonged.

They’re so damn cocky, thought Walter Mitty, walking along Main

Street; they think They’re so damn cocky, thought Walter Mitty, walking
along Main Street; they think they know everything. Once he had tried to
take his chains off, outside New Milford, and he had got them wound
around the axles. A man had had to come out in a wrecking car and unwind
them, a young, grinning garageman. Since then Mrs. Mitty always made
him drive to a garage to have the chains taken off.The next time, he
thought,I’ll wear my right arm in a sling; they won’t grin at me then.I’ll
have my right arm in a sling and they’ll see I couldn’t possibly take the
chains off myself. He kicked at the slush on the sidewalk.“Overshoes,” he
said to himself, and he began looking for a shoe store.

When he came out into the street again, with the overshoes in a box
under his arm, Walter Mitty began to wonder what the other thing was his
wife had told him to get. She had told him, twice, before they set out from
their house for Waterbury.In a way he hated these weekly trips to town—he
was always getting something wrong. Kleenex, he thought, Squibb’s, razor
blades? No.Toothpaste, toothbrush, bicarbonate, carborundum, initiative and
referendum? He gave it up. But she would remember it.“Where’s the
what’s-its-name?”she would ask.“Don’t tell me you forgot the what’s-its-
name.” A newsboy went by shouting something about the Waterbury trial.

. . .“Perhaps this will refresh your memory.”The District Attorney

suddenly thrust a heavy automatic at the quiet figure on the witness
stand.“Have you ever seen this before?”Walter Mitty took the gun and
examined it expertly.“This is my WebleyVickers 50.80,” he said calmly. An
excited buzz ran around the courtroom.The Judge rapped for order.“You are
a crack shot with any sort of firearms,I believe?”said the District Attorney,
insinuatingly.“Objection!”shouted Mitty’s attorney.“We have shown that
the defendant could not have fired the shot.We have shown that he wore his
right arm in a sling on the night of the fourteenth of July.”Walter Mitty
raised his hand briefly and the bickering attorneys were stilled.“With any
known make of gun,” he said evenly, “I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst
at three hundred feet with my left hand.” Pandemonium broke loose in the
courtroom. A woman’s scream rose above the bedlam and suddenly a
lovely, dark-haired girl was in Walter Mitty’s arms.The District Attorney
struck at her savagely.Without rising from his chair, Mitty let the man have
it on the point of the chin.“You miserable cur!”. . .

“Puppy biscuit,”said Walter Mitty. He stopped walking and the

buildings of Waterbury rose up out of the misty courtroom and surrounded
him again. A woman who was passing laughed.“He said ‘Puppy
biscuit,’”she said to her companion.“That man said ‘Puppy biscuit’to
himself.”Walter Mitty hurried on. He went into an A. & P., not the first one
he came to but a smaller one farther up the street.“I want some biscuit for
small, young dogs,” he said to the clerk.“Any special brand, sir?”The
greatest pistol shot in the world thought a moment.“It says ‘Puppies Bark
for It’ on the box,”said Walter Mitty.

His wife would be through at the hairdresser’s in fifteen minutes,

Mitty saw in looking at his watch, unless they had trouble drying it;
sometimes they had trouble drying it. She didn’t like to get to the hotel first;
she would want him to be there waiting for her as usual. He found a big
leather chair in the lobby, facing a window, and he put the overshoes and
the puppy biscuit on the floor beside it. He picked up an old copy of Liberty
and sank down into the chair.“Can Germany Conquer the World Through
the Air?”Walter Mitty looked at the pictures of bombing planes and of
ruined streets.

. . .“The cannonading has got the wind up in young Raleigh, sir,”said

the sergeant. Captain Mitty looked up at him through touselled hair.“Get
him to bed,” he said wearily. “With the others.I’ll fly alone.”“But you can’t,
sir,”said the sergeant anxiously.“It takes two men to handle that bomber and
the Archies are pounding hell out of the air. Von Richtman’s circus is
between here and Saulier.”“Somebody’s got to get that ammunition
dump,”said Mitty.“I’m going over. Spot of brandy?” He poured a drink for
the sergeant and one for himself.War thundered and whined around the
dugout and battered at the door.There was a rending of wood and splinters
flew through the room.“A bit of a near thing,”said Captain Mitty
carelessly.“The box barrage is closing in,”said the sergeant. “We only live
once, Sergeant,”said Mitty, with his faint, fleeting smile.“Or do we?” He
poured another brandy and tossed it off.“I never see a man could hold his
brandy like you, sir,”said the sergeant.“Begging your pardon, sir.” Captain
Mitty stood up and strapped on his huge Webley-Vickers automatic.“It’s
forty kilometres through hell, sir,” said the sergeant. Mitty finished one last
brandy.“After all,” he said softly,“what isn’t?” The pounding of the cannon
increased; there was the rat-tat-tatting of machine guns, and from
somewhere came the menacing pocketa-pocketa-pocketa of the new
flamethrowers.Walter Mitty walked to the door of the dugout humming
“Auprès de Ma Blonde.” He turned and waved to the sergeant.“Cheerio!” he
said. . . .

Something struck his shoulder.“I’ve been looking all over this hotel
for you,”said Mrs. Mitty.“Why do you have to hide in this old chair? How
did you expect me to find you?” “Things close in,”said Walter Mitty
vaguely.“What?”Mrs. Mitty said.“Did you get the what’s-its-name? The
puppy biscuit? What’s in that box?”“Overshoes,”said Mitty. “Couldn’t you
have put them on in the store?”“I was thinking,”said Walter Mitty.“Does it
ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking?” She looked at him.“I’m
going to take your temperature when I get you home,”she said.

They went out through the revolving doors that made a faintly
derisive whistling sound when you pushed them.It was two blocks to the
parking lot. At the drugstore on the corner she said,“Wait here for me.I
forgot something.I won’t be a minute.” She was more than a minute.Walter
Mitty lighted a cigarette.It began to rain, rain with sleet in it. He stood up
against the wall of the drugstore, smoking. . . . He put his shoulders back
and his heels together.“To hell with the handkerchief,”said Walter Mitty
scornfully. He took one last drag on his cigarette and snapped it away.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.
 PLOT SUMMARY

"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" is a classic short story written by

James Thurber. The narrative revolves around the mundane life of Walter
Mitty, a middle-aged man with a vivid imagination. Walter constantly
daydreams to escape the dull and ordinary aspects of his reality. Throughout
the story, he finds himself in various fantastical scenarios where he is a
heroic and daring figure, living a life far removed from his routine
existence.

In the real world, Walter is a meek and submissive individual who is

often dominated by his wife, Mrs. Mitty. She frequently scolds him for his
absent-mindedness and tendency to drift into his own imaginative world.
However, Walter's daydreams serve as a coping mechanism, allowing him
to experience excitement and adventure in his mind.

The narrative takes an interesting turn when Walter embarks on a

series of errands, each triggering a new daydream. Whether he is a skilled
surgeon, a fearless war pilot, or a courtroom hero, Walter's daydreams
contrast sharply with his passive reality. The story reaches its climax when
Walter faces a moment of genuine danger, and his response surprises both
himself and those around him.

"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" is a poignant exploration of the

power of imagination and the contrast between the ordinary and the
extraordinary. It delves into the human desire for adventure and the ways in
which individuals navigate the challenges of their everyday lives. The story
has resonated with readers for its relatable portrayal of escapism and the
universal theme of yearning for a life beyond the ordinary.
 CHARACTERS & CHARACTERIZATION

1. Walter Mitty:

 Role: The protagonist of the story, Walter Mitty is a middle-aged

man who leads a rather ordinary and monotonous life. He works as a
daydreamer, escaping his mundane reality through vivid and heroic
fantasies.
 Characterization: Walter is portrayed as a passive and submissive
individual in his everyday life. He is dominated by his wife, Mrs.
Mitty, and often forgets or misunderstands details of his daily
routine. However, in his daydreams, he transforms into various
heroic personas, showcasing a desire for adventure and excitement.
2. Mrs. Mitty:
 Role: Walter's wife, Mrs. Mitty, plays a significant role in the story.
She is depicted as a practical and assertive woman who scolds
Walter for his absent-mindedness and daydreaming tendencies.
 Characterization: Mrs. Mitty is characterized by her no-nonsense
attitude and frustration with Walter's frequent lapses into fantasy.
Her interactions with Walter in the real world provide a contrast to
the adventurous scenarios he envisions in his daydreams.
3. Supporting Characters:

 The story includes several brief encounters with supporting

characters, such as a parking lot attendant, a policeman, and a
surgeon. These characters exist in the real-world settings of Walter's
day-to-day life and contribute to the humor and irony of the
narrative.
4. Fantasy Characters:

 In Walter's daydreams, he takes on various roles, including a

surgeon, a war pilot, and a courtroom hero. These fantasy personas
highlight Walter's longing for excitement and his dissatisfaction with
his ordinary existence.
The characterization in "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" serves to highlight
the contrast between Walter's imaginative world and his actual life. Walter's
daydreams not only provide comic relief but also offer insight into his inner
desires and the disconnect between his aspirations and reality. The
characters, though relatively simple, contribute to the story's exploration of
the human psyche and the ways in which individuals cope with the
challenges of their lives.
 REFERENCES

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1939/03/18/the-secret-life-of-walter-
mitty-james-thurber
 AUTHOR’S BIODATA

Full Name : James Thurber

Gender : Male

Birth : December 8, 1894, in Columbus, Ohio, USA.

Death : November 2, 1961, in New York City, New York, USA.

Education:

 Thurber attended Ohio State University, where he began his career

as a reporter and editor for the university's newspaper.
 He did not graduate due to an eye injury sustained while playing a

game of "William Tell" with friends.

Occupation : The Columbus Dispatch, The Newyorker, Cartoonist and

Author, Playwright

Period : 1946–1964

Genre : elements of fantasy and escapism.

Notable Works : "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (1939) - a short story that
became one of his most famous works.
"My Life and Hard Times" (1933) - a humorous
autobiographical collection of essays.
"The Thurber Carnival" (1945) - a collection of his most
popular stories, essays, and drawings.

Literary Movement : Christian realism

Awards : Special Tony Award (1958), Tony Award for Best Revival
of a Play (1996), Presidential Medal of Freedom (1961)
 WRITER’S BIODATA

Full Name : Rabitha Halula Kamal

Nick Name : Bitha
Birth : April 27th, 2004, Depok, Jawa-Barat, Indonesia
Gender : Female
Religion : Islam
Occupation : Student of English Department in Pamulang University
Hobby : Watching movies and listen to music
Favorite movies: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Disney movies and Studio
Ghibli’s movies