Hey everyone! For this week’s blog post, I am going to discuss The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber. One of the reasons I want to talk about The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is its accessibility to all of you guys, as it is a notably short story available for free online. In addition to its vast availability, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is also a funnier and more comical tale. With spring break just around the corner, I wanted to lighten things up a bit on Too Long Didn’t Read while still delving into an intriguing premise as per usual.

When boiled down to its core, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty exaggerates and finds humor in the relationship between a head-in-the-clouds husband, Walter Mitty, and his always nagging wife, Mrs. Mitty. The key aspect of the book is the juxtaposition between Walter Mitty’s daydreams and the reality of his life/marriage. My favorite daydream that Walter Mitty imagines portrays him as a well-respected doctor or surgeon.

In the setting of an operating room, Walter Mitty enjoys hearing the praises of his colleagues around him. One of the first things one of the imaginary surgeons tells “Dr. Mitty” is that they’ve “read [his] book on streptothricosis.” For those who don’t know, streptothricosis is also referred to as dermatophilosis and is “an acute or chronic bacterial infection of the epidermis” infecting primarily animals, but also humans (Hamid). Given this information, you might expect Dr. Mitty to be a veterinarian or dermatologist, or even a specialist in infectious diseases, but in the story, he then goes on to miraculously perform a surgery that only a highly complex machine could complete.

What a relief that Dr. Mitty was able to save this patient from the coreopsis that was beginning to set in. Another vocabulary factoid, coreopsis is a genus of flower. Also of note, the reason for the patient being on the table in the first place was an “obstreosis of the ductal tract.” Mind you, obstreosis is not a real word. Let’s all just thank the author for inserting several improperly used and entirely fake words to simulate the sound of medical jargon for normies!

In effect, these wonderful made-up medical terms really add to the complete fantasy that Walter Mitty is living through in his head. Walter Mitty is nowhere near being a doctor, nor a Navy commander, nor an audacious wildcard on trial for murder, nor a fighter pilot, as he is depicted in the other daydreams.

Rather, Walter Mitty is instead an ordinary man who is being woken up from his delusion after driving straight into an exit lane. Walter Mitty is trying his best to appease Mrs. Mitty by wearing his gloves and buying overshoes to protect his feet from the rain while escorting her to her different appointments and errands.

Overall, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a breath of fresh air and a burst of comedic relief headed into this spring break. If you’d like to read The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, or learn more about streptothricosis, I’ve left the link below. Until the next blog post, see y’all later!

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/veterinary-science-and-veterinary-medicine/streptothricosis

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1939/03/18/the-secret-life-of-walter-james-thurber