Refection of the Secret Life of Walter Mitty

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READING REFLECTION Mary Lally ENG 125: Introduction to Literature DR. Kayla Ward June 25, 2012 READING REFLECTION After reading all the chapters the one that stood out in my head the most was The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. As Clugston mentions” If you know someone that is always caught up in daydreams and thoughts that have little to do with day- to- day matters then you will recognize Walter Mitty” (Clugston 2010). "The Secret Life of [Walter Mitty]" is a short story by James Thurber, published in 1939. Walter Mitty is a henpecked husband who, among other things, dutifully drives his wife to town to run errands and visit a hairdresser while he patiently waits. One day Mitty has five heroic daydreams in which he is a Navy pilot, a brilliant surgeon, an expert marksman and a bombardier on his way to attack a German ammunition dump. In his final fantasy, he defiantly faces a firing squad. (Walter Mitty was a daydreamer., 2012). From the beginning Thurber reels you in with his great simile comparing the commander’s voice to thin ice breaking. If you every watched the history channel it becomes apparent that his voice is breaking and he is scared to death. He keeps you engaged and has the ability to put you in the book as if you were the captain in the aircraft. Just like everyday life someone snaps you out of the daydream. In his case it happens to be his wife yelling at him to slow down. I choose to critic the formalist approach. The one thing about the setting that stood out was that he was daydreaming about the past. In his case it happened to be when he was in the war and flashed back to reality when his wife started to yell at him. Thurber uses such great satire here. He brings great detail to how his wife is acting and how she should be acting when his wife is yelling at him for driving fifty-five when she likes him to go forty. He politely says,

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