The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Bridgette Wrice

Eng 125 Introduction to Literature

Instructor: Lesa Hadley

July 30, 2012

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Walter Mitty is a dreamer of literary times. He devotes most of his time fleeing into dreams in which he is bright and daring, and his life is melodramatic and daring. The continuing admiration of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" is certainly due to the readers' skill to identify With Mitty. "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" captured my interest because the writer described the imaginary characters extremely well in his literature. I found "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" literary work to be very interesting. It deals with an imaginary character that was always caught up in habitual daydreaming. "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" reveals the secret life of Walter Mitty by exploring different scenes of Mitty's imagination. "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" is able to invite readers into Walter's imaginary world by stirring up many psychological events with the reader. What does litereary criticism hope to achieve? There are many schools of thoughts, but all take as their starting point the analysis of the reader's or listener's response (Litlang Ltda., 2007).

In reading the text "Walter Mitty's Secret Life" the reader may feel some empathetic or humored with the writers imagination about the habitual daydreamer. He may similarly in this short story question the character's need for emotional communication in his marriage relationship. Walter's respective daydreaming was a means of both escape and connection. "Walter Mitty's Secret Life" manipulates the character and his plot through the power of his human imagination to captivate the interest of the reader. Imagination is the human power that shapes artistic expression; it enables writer's work to become an expression of meaning in our world, and allows readers to engage in identifying with what the writer has to say about things that matter (Clugston, 2010).

A formalist approach focuses on the form and development of the literary work itself. Every writer chooses particular literary tools to create a representation of something that exists in his or her imagination (Clungston, R. 2010). This technique uses a series of questions to evaluate the literary work:

*What makes the setting so memorable?

*Why was the plot intriguing? Did surprise occur?

*How were the characters described, contrasted, and