Let us recall that the definition of irony is the gap
between appearance and reality. Clearly, therefore, Walter Mitty with his repeated day
dreams that occur throughout the story and then his real, hum-drum life where he is
constantly nagged by his annoying wife, represent opposite poles of the kind of life
Walter Mitty would like to live and the actual life he has to
live.
Let us just briefly examine the daydreams that Walter
Mitty has. In each, he is a charismatic, vibrant man who is daring, brave and
courageous. He is able to inspire the confidence of those around him. In the first
daydream, for example, when the commander Mitty heads the plane straight into the storm
(a suicidal move, pure action hero nonsense), the crew of the plane have absolute
confidence in Mitty:
The crew, bending to their various tasks in the
huge, hurtling eight-engined navy hyroplane, 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!"...
The key word for
these daydreams is significant. Through this escape, Walter Mitty becomes a significant
individual. This is of course in sharp contrast to his actual day to day existence.
Consider how his wife treats him and also how Mitty thinks of their
relationship:
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."
It is clear that
Mitty's wife has him under her thumb, and her manner of repeating herself and her
complaints twice makes her particularly
irritating.
Clearly, then, there is massive irony in
Mitty's character. His monotonous existence forces him to live the life he thinks he
would like to lead in his daydreams - and here lies the central irony, for in some
ways, his reality is less real than his daydreams.
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