The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber
Quick answer: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber: summary with the ending, the five daydreams, Mrs Mitty, the overshoes and puppy biscuit, and the cut from fantasy to fact.
A Navy hydroplane commander barks orders through a hurricane, and then his wife tells him he is driving too fast, and he is Walter Mitty again, on the road to Waterbury for the weekly shopping. James Thurber published The Secret Life of Walter Mitty in The New Yorker in March 1939 and collected it in My World and Welcome to It (1942).
It gave the language a word for the meek daydreamer and is taught as the neatest example of cutting between fantasy and reality.
The story in brief, ending included
Mitty drives his wife to town for her hair appointment while she nags him about speed, overshoes and gloves. Each humiliation sends him into a heroic fantasy. Passing a hospital he becomes a famous surgeon saving a millionaire banker, until a parking attendant shouts at him for entering the wrong lane. Remembering that garage men laugh at his incompetence with tyre chains, he buys the overshoes and tries to recall the second item his wife told him to get.
A newsboy shouting about a trial turns him into a defendant on the stand, coolly admitting he could have shot a man with his left hand; the word cur reminds him of puppy biscuit, and he buys it. In a hotel lobby he reads about air war and becomes a captain volunteering for a suicide mission. Mrs Mitty arrives and scolds him for hiding in the chair. Outside a drugstore she goes in for something she forgot, and Mitty, standing in the rain with his back to the wall, lights a cigarette and faces a firing squad, proud and disdainful, undefeated. The story ends there.
The characters
One man, one wife, five better selves.
Themes: the inner life against the errand list
The classroom readings are escapism, the gap between the self we imagine and the self others see, and the small tyrannies of marriage and town life. The fantasies are stitched from films and magazines: Mitty's imagination is borrowed, and still it is the only place he is free.
The sharper observation is the final image. Mitty ends before a firing squad, not on a bridge or in a cockpit; the last fantasy is of dying well, which tells you how the day has felt.
The craft: the cut
Every fantasy is triggered by a real word or sight and broken by a real voice, and Thurber never announces the switch: the reader is in the operating theatre, then in a parking lot, within a sentence. The turn is not one moment but a rhythm, and the comedy comes from the speed of the fall each time.
The technique to steal is the trigger word. Let an ordinary noun (cur, chains, hospital) open a door in the character's head, and slam it with dialogue from outside. Mitty's borrowed, slightly wrong jargon is a second lesson in writing a fantasist.
For class and essays
Model answers, vocabulary, one misreading.
What writers can take from this
- For exams, map each fantasy to its trigger and its interruption.
- Note the borrowed, slightly wrong jargon in the fantasies as characterisation.
- Argue about the firing squad as the story's one admission of defeat.
- Writers: switch worlds mid-paragraph with no signpost; trust the reader.
- Give your fantasist a specific errand list; the mundane is what makes the grandeur funny.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a character runs three dull errands in one afternoon and escapes each into a heroic fantasy triggered by a single word or sight. Switch between worlds without any transition and break each fantasy with a line of real dialogue. Let the final fantasy quietly admit what the day has been.
Questions
What is the theme of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty?
Escapism and the distance between the self we imagine and the self others see. Mitty's borrowed heroic fantasies are the only place he is competent, and each is punctured by ordinary life.
What are Walter Mitty's daydreams?
He is a Navy hydroplane commander in a storm, a famous surgeon, a cool defendant in a murder trial, a bomber captain on a suicide mission, and finally a man facing a firing squad.
Why does the story end with a firing squad?
It is the one fantasy about dying rather than winning. After a day of small humiliations, Mitty imagines facing death proudly, and Thurber ends without returning him to reality.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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