The Secret Life of Emotional Response

Walter Mitty Revisited

The original short story by Thurber does not lead to actual adventures in the main character's life. His fictional life remains ordinary. Unlike either the Danny Kaye or the Ben Stiller films, the story ends quite poignantly and defiantly delineating a permanent difference between the character's daydreams and his mundane days, filled with routine errands and awareness of his own short-comings; but his submissiveness to his wife and knowledge of his own lack of practical heroism or heroic capability are offset by his fantasies and a capacity to imagine himself heroic. His ultimate lapse shows he is a hero. His imagined defiance to the imaginary firing squad, as all his daydreams, is an emotional response. His final daydream is a metaphor for his defiance to his ineffectual and ordinary life.

This is the psychology most of us live with to some degree. Although we may not imagine ourselves doing grandiose things in battle, in the operating room, overcoming mechanical and natural challenges with aplomb while others watch in open admiration, we like to believe we are better than we are at what we do, and thought of more highly than we may actually be from moment to moment by our peers. We create these pockets of notions about ourselves moment to moment, and how we would like to be seen, in order to fend off the slights and errors of our ordinary life which seem outrageous to the ego and cause the id to writhe eloquent in emotional soliloquy.

On a further consideration, this psychological perspective is adolescent. That is, the desire to impress and be admired, the need to prove oneself and gain approval of others, ought to wane in adulthood and be eclipsed by a growing acceptance of actual limitations. As we age and mature, we learn to take satisfaction in what we can do. A mature person takes pleasure in the ordinary events of his or her life, and does not see them as something less than acts of physical bravery or publicly acknowledged excellence. Indeed, mediocrity replaces excellence easily in our minds, analogous to our pleasure with bad food over fine cuisine when we are truly hungry and happy to have something to eat at all. In the story, however, his wife's dominance and his submissiveness differentiate the character from most of us. The marital relationship indicates why the character has stagnated. He has a conflict in his choices, and his daydreams are paradoxically both a cause and a result.

Similar conflicts show up for most of us in how we respond to fiction. What stories grab our attention indicate what lapses into fantasy we use to contrast with our own limitations in order to bolster identity and stave off what we may believe subconsciously to be our short-comings. Movies, TV shows, books, songs, news reports, viral videos, and even a passing joke, can reveal what's going on under the surface. We all have a submissive marriage with reality and a secret life that keeps us going.  

This then is perhaps my secret life. As much made up of illusion as allusions, and of self-image imagined as of ideas expressed, I find satisfaction and comfort in putting words together in a way unique to me. This is a persona none may ever know or admire, but in my own mind I become the hero of my story. Whether it is good or bad does not matter in the end because I know the simple act of thinking makes it so.