The Secret Life of Walter Mitty & the Story of an Hour

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty & the Story of an Hour

Introduction

The paper critically compares and contrasts the two famous literary works i.e. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber and The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin.

James Thurber is one of famous humorists of the nineteenth century. James Thurber (1894-1961) was born in Columbus, where after attending the University he began his long career as a journalist. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is one of the best works of the American humorists. In the year 1939, this story was first published in the New Yorker magazine and received great praise. Furthermore, it was reprinted and published in 1942 in the collection of James Thurber. For years, the work was marked by humor and the rigor of his concise writing, often accompanied by their distinctive graphics. The main character of the story is a middle aged, middle class man who escapes from the routine hard work of his sub-urban life into fantasies of heroic invasion (Walter & Hamlin, 1978). This story made the Walter Mitty as a typical American figure. It is a unique exercise of humor applied to everyday life. A behavioral sketch is a description of something in the intrusion of fantasy in normal life that fascinated James Thurber repeatedly.

In the famous story with the title - The Story of an Hour, Chopin highlights specific structural and stylistic methods in order to enhance the drama of the hour. The structure which was chosen completely fits the subject material perfectly. The story is short, made up of a sequence of short paragraphs, several of which include just two and three sentences. Similarly, the story does cover only an hour in the life of Louise Mallard from the instant she learns of her husband's death to the moment he surprisingly returns alive. The Story of an Hour account, as its title reveals, the story of a moment in the life of Louise Mallard, a married woman and possibly aristocrat or at least of possessions (Verdonk, 2002).

Thesis Statement

Both the literary works depict the story of ordinary individuals in conflict with the ordinary world around them.

Discussion

This story depicts a man whose extremely mundane life is constantly interrupted by the character's escapist fantasies. This is the real heart of the story in which Mitty's try to resolve his conflict. Though the entertaining illustrations of the author were famous during his lifetime due to which Thurber received slight scholarly attention. In view of some of the critics, his work was regarded as more than formulaic and unusual (Elias, 1947). The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a perfect example of this collection of twenty-three new and six animal fables have whimsical and naive entangled in comic situations of absurdity. The success of this classic American humor of the twentieth century was also pursued with the famous movie adaptation in 1947 of The Secret Life of Walter ...