Walter Mitty's secret life

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Walter Mitty's Secret Life ( English The Secret Life of Walter Mitty ) is one of the most famous short stories by the American writer James Thurber . It was first published on March 18, 1939 in The New Yorker magazine , in which most of his other stories also appeared. A publication in the anthology My World and Welcome to It followed three years later . Since then it has been printed in numerous other anthologies, especially in The Thurber Carnival from 1945, arguably the author's most successful collection of stories and drawings.

action

Walter Mitty, an inconspicuous, restrained middle-aged man, goes on their weekly shopping tour with his wife, who is tyrannical overprotective. Even while driving, he indulges in adventurous daydreams : As an experienced and daring flight captain, he saves his crew from the worst storm in twenty years, but is soon brought back to reality by his wife, who complains about his "frenzy" and him reminded to buy overshoes for herself while going to the barber shop. When he puts on gloves at her insistence and passes a hospital, he becomes the famous surgeon who performs a spectacular operation on his prominent patient. The real Mitty is so distracted that he almost rams another car when parking. When the parking attendant comes to his aid and effortlessly brings the vehicle into the correct position, he muses gloomily about his personal weaknesses and those know-it-alls who are superior to him.

When he was looking for a shoe shop, a newsboy ran past him and shouted something about the "Waterbury case". Mitty finds himself accused of a murder trial in a courtroom and is cross-examined by the prosecutor. As it tries to relieve his defense by pointing out his right arm was injured at the time of the act, Mitty brings it with a loose gesture to silence and explains cool, he had Gregory Fitzhurst even from 300 feet away with the left to shoot.

After doing his shopping, Mitty sits down in a leather armchair in the lobby and picks up a magazine that addresses the question of whether Germany could conquer the world in an air war. As a death-defying bomber pilot, Mitty then flies a flying machine designed for two pilots single-handedly through enemy airspace. Again he is torn from his daydream by his wife, who reproaches him and points out that she has already searched the entire building for him. On the way back to the car, she remembers that she forgot something and runs back. Mitty leans against a wall, lights a cigarette, and faces a firing squad. With a fleeting smile on his face, upright, motionless, proud and contemptuous, he looks his executioner in the face: 'Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last.'

Text analysis and interpretation

The main character Walter Mitty is the archetype and the most famous example of the clumsy male protagonist, overwhelmed and estranged with the complexity of the modern world , as is typical of the author's works. At the same time, despite its brevity, the story itself is extremely complex: on its various narrative levels, it takes up almost all conflict positions that are usually discussed in literature: man versus man, man versus society, man versus nature, man versus himself and man against conscience.

Stylistically, in Walter Mitty's daydreams, Thurber draws on the pathetic, extravagant language of the trivial pulp magazines and thus makes their clichés the subject of his mockery. The humorous effect also unfolds in the protagonist's profound ignorance of the things he raves about; for example, the potentially “fatal diagnosis” of Coreopsis , which drives his colleague Renshaw's face with horror, is actually just a harmless ornamental plant.

reception

The humorous short story is considered to be one of the greatest masterpieces by James Thurber and has led to an extensive reception, especially in popular culture. The word Walter Mitty has since entered the vocabulary of the English language as a symbol for the clumsy daydreamer and, as Walter Mitty-ness, has become the subject of social-psychological research. At the same time, the figure is also considered an image of its creator; Wilhelm Bittorf , for example, wrote at the time in 1953 : "Only in James Thurber personally can you track down what makes his characters - the daydreamer Walter Mitty and the perplexed-problematic Monroe couple - so funny, so sad, so comforting."

The story of Walter Mitty has been filmed twice, first in 1947 with Danny Kaye in the leading role of Walter Mitty ( Das Doppelleben des Herr Mitty ), most recently in 2013 under the direction of Ben Stiller ( The amazing life of Walter Mitty ). Both films differ greatly in their plot from the literature and use it as a mere inspiration for their own material.

As part of the anthology This Is My Best in Screen Guild Theater radio station CBS was The Secret Life of Walter Mitty with Robert Benchley in the lead role for the first time in 1944 adapted for the radio. In 1977 Achim Scholz realized Walter Mitty's Secret Life as a radio play in an adaptation by Gerhard Rentzsch for the radio in the GDR ; Walter Lendrich acted as spokesman for Walter Mitty, while Käthe Reichel took over the role of his wife.

Others

Although The Secret Life of Walter Mitty initially appears to be a rather undemanding or simple text, this first impression of an effortlessly written down is deceptive. It took Thurber no less than eight weeks to complete this short story . Only after 15 different versions did the text get its final form, in which every sentence is meaningful.

expenditure

My World and Welcome to It. Harcourt, New York, 1942.
The Thurber Carnival . Harper and Brothers, New York, 1945.
Thurber. Writings and Drawings . Literary Classics of the United States. Penguin Books, New York, 1996.
  • First published in German translation in:
Save yourself who can! Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg, 1948.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Carl Sundell: The Architecture of Walter Mitty's Secret Life. In: The English Journal 56/9, 1967, pp. 1284-1287.
  2. ^ Milton A. Kaplan: Style IS Content . In: The English Journal 57/9, 1968, pp. 1333f.
  3. ↑ James Ellis: The Allusions in "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" . In: The English Journal 54/4, 1965, pp. 310-313.
  4. ^ Walter Mitty on Dictionary.com, accessed January 12, 2014.
  5. ↑ Kenneth L. Higbee: Expression of 'Walter Mittyness' in actual behavior. In: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 20/3, 1971, pp. 416-422.
  6. ^ Wilhelm Bittorf: A collection of eccentrics. To James Thurber's autobiography . Die Zeit, August 27, 1953, accessed on January 12, 2014.
  7. ^ John Dunning: On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio . Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998, p. 664.
  8. ^ The Secret Life of Walter Mitty , radio adaptation with Robert Benchley on Archive.com, accessed January 12, 2014.
  9. ↑ Radio play Walter Mitty's Secret Life ( Memento of the original from January 12, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in the archive of Hoerspieleipps.net, accessed on January 12, 2014. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.hoerspieleipps.net
  10. ↑ See Charles S. Holmes: Thurber. A Collection of Critical Essays. Eaglewood Cliffs (NJ) 1974, p. 3. After Jens Martin Gurr: James Thurber: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. In: Michael Hanke (Ed.): Interpretations · American Short Stories of the 20th Century . Reclam jun. Verlag, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-15-017506-2 , pp. 36–43, here p. 37.