Text Three The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
I. Background
✧ Author Biography
金圣叹简介James Thurber was a prolific writer and artist who published over twenty books of stories, biographies, drawings, sketches, essays, poetry, fables and cartoons. During the 1920s and 1930s, Thurber wrote for the popular and influential literary magazine, The New Yorker. His work for the magazine established his reputation as a comic with a sophisticated nsibility who largely wrote about upper middle-class intellectuals. Much of his work focud on the milieu of East Coast society.
Thurber was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1894, and some of his writing, such as his “mock” memoirs, My Life and Hard Times, treat his experiences as a boy growing up in Ohio. After attending Ohio State University, he worked as a newspaper reporter in Ohio, France, and New York before joining the staff of the The New Yorker in 1927. As a writer and editor at Th
e New Yorker, Thurber worked with the versatile writer E. B. White, who wrote the well-known children’s favorite Charlotte’s Web and other works. White’s literary skill influenced Thurber’s craft. Thurber wrote fifteen drafts of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” a story of five pages, before he submitted it for publication.
Thurber gained recognition for his work from Williams College and Yale University, which awarded him honorary degrees, and his drawings were exhibited in international art shows. Regarded primarily as a humorist, Thurber’s reputation as a rious writer has suffered somewhat. Critical attention has focud largely on the comic aspect of his writing and not on the deeper themes and social satire prent in his work.
Thurber married twice. His first marriage to Althea Adams lasted thirteen years and produced a daughter. After they divorced, he married Helen Wismer. In the 1940s, Thurber began losing his vision. Eventually, he went completely blind. In his later years, depresd by his health and by the anticommunist movement of the 1950s, which he oppod, Thurber’s writing became more pessimistic. He died in 1961.
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✧ 广西中考Critical Overview
“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is a short story centering on the daydreams of a henpecked Connecticut husband. It was first published in the March 18, 1939, issue of 遵义旅游景点The New Yorker量化宽松. Harcourt, Brace and Company published it in October, 1942, in a book collection of Thurber’s works, My World--and Welcome to It.
The action takes place in the late 1930s in a car traveling to Waterbury, Connecticut, and in the city itlf in the area of Main Street. Waterbury is in west-central Connecticut on the Naugatuck River.
“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is Thurber’s best-known short story. Walter Mitty has become a well-known character in American fiction. The tenth edition of the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary defines a “Walter Mitty” as “a commonplace unadventurous person who eks escape from reality through daydreaming.” Walter Mitty, the average, ineffectual American is a recurring character-type in Thurber’s fiction. Critics refer to this type of character as the “Thurber male.”
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However, critics are divided on how to interpret this Thurberian character. On the one hand, Richard C. Tobias’s 夸老公优秀的句子The Art of James Thurber views Thurber as a cerebral comic writer, who protagonists defeat humdrum reality with their imaginations. On the other hand, Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill discuss Thurber’s bleak comic nsibility in their book, America’s Humor. Characters like Mitty, Blair argues, let their neurotic fears defeat them, and are unable to cope with the world. In The Georgia Review, Carl M. Lindner es Walter Mitty as the latest in a line of American male heroes, such as Rip Van Winkle and Tom Sawyer. Like the archetypal comic figures, Mitty choos to escape society rather than confront it. Refusing to accept adult responsibility, Lindner argues, the figures of masculinity regress to boyish behavior.
Critics disagree about Thurber’s portrayal of women as well. Commentators such as Blair and Hill consider him a misogynist — a person who hates women. Viewing Mrs. Mitty as the one responsible for Walter’s loss of independence and his inability to function, such critics believe Thurber was oppod to strong, empowered female characters. Tobias, on the other hand, prais Thurber’s asrtive female characters. Critics who analyze Thurb
er’s stories as lightly comic and triumphant are more likely to regard favorably his depictions of women; tho who concentrate on his darker themes point to his negative portrayals of women.
Another issue which recurs in critical discussion is Thurber’s view of modern life and his technique in portraying it. His writing has been compared to that of modernist writers such as William Faulkner, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. His u of wordplay, integration of different narrative consciousness, and treatment of the absurdity of modern life connect Thurber’s fiction to modernism. Robert Morberger, in his monograph, James Thurber, characterizes Thurber as a Romantic writer, one who oppos technological advances and rationality and believes in the mind’s ability to provide an escape from the destructive forces of society. In an essay in the English Journal乌龟生活习性, Carl Sundell discuss the “architectural design” of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” He notes that Thurber address four of the five major types of conflict found in fiction: Man vs. Man, Man vs. Society, Man vs. Self and Man vs. Nature. Sundell compares Thurber’s ability to elicit the sympathy of the reader in “Mitty” to J. D. Salinger’s portrayal of Holden Caulfield, the prot
agonist in die novel Catcher in the Rye. He notes that, like Holden, Walter ems to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Unlike the adolescent Caulfield, though, Walter is an adult, and thus his chronic daydreaming merits less sympathy from the reader.
