SOURCE: "'Things Close In': Dissolution and Misanthropy in 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,'" in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 105-10.

In the following essay, Kaufman disputes the consensus that Walter Mitty is an everyman to be sympathized with. Instead, he proposes that the story is a critique of Mitty's inability to cope with his life.

"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" is quite possibly the best known American short story. "Walter Mitty" as a character type has penetrated the popular imagination: we speak of a person inclined to day dreaming as a "Walter Mitty." Mitty, by consensus, represents the American little man, comfortably suburban, but bored to death with a middle-class, middlebrow life. Clearly his life is severely conventional, and it is obvious that Thurber is suggesting that American middle-class life offers little in the way of opportunities for romance, heroism, "a life...