Point Of View In The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty

Diction is just one of the literary elements used in this short story which convey the narrator's attitude towards Bartleby.

Basically, people always seem to be either yelling or laughing at him for one mistake or another. This makes him create his own life and have daydreams in which he is the opposite of what he is in reality. On their way to town, he had his first daydream as is a brave military commander piloting a hydroplane, but his wife interrupts by yelling at him, saying: “You’re driving too fast!”. (Thurber,1939) When she insists on him to make an appointment with his physician, he becomes a famous surgeon at work, until a parking-lot attendant calls his attention to come back to reality. Mitty was pissed and thought: “they think they know everything”. (Thurber,1939) Mitty’s third daydream is of being the defendant in a trial, and he is woken by a mental association with dog biscuits, which his wife asked him to buy. At that moment he gets bothered because, “A woman who was passing laughed. "He said 'Puppy biscuit,'" she said to her companion. "That man said 'Puppy biscuit' to himself."” (Thurber,1939) As he waits for his wife to finish at the hairdresser, he daydreams of being a British pilot willing to sacrifice his life for his country, and he is again woken by his wife, who was looking for him. In a moment Walter asked his wife “Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking?”

Due to the use of hyperbolic metaphors to demonstrate Cady’s wellbeing and views on herself, the reader must interpret what the hyperbolic metaphors mean from an unreliable narrator and to what extent does this change her views on herself and how this progresses the plot of the novel. Throughout We Were

She had fallen in love. His visits had thrilled her, his departures destroyed her. She was perplexed—he had seemed to be conducting a courtship and even urged her to abandon her studies and run with him to Chicago, but now he was gone and his letters came only rarely. She gladly would have left Boston under the flag of marriage, but not under the reckless terms he proposed. He would have made an excellent husband. He was affectionate in ways she rarely encountered men. She missed his warmth and touch.” (201). The description of how Holmes interacts with Minnie is written in a compare and contrast structure. By utilizing this structure, Larson characterizes Holmes as a person that makes everything into a joke or a game. At first he seems to care for someone, but then his true intentions come out and he starts to act like a maniacal person. It turns out that he doesn’t actually care for anyone, despite the strong feelings they seem to have for him. Not only does comparing and contrasting the personalities of Holmes show his true colors, but Larson also organizes Holmes’s personalities into two separate people. This organization only further proves how far Holmes will go to reach his goal. Holmes’s strong want for things to go his way adds emphasis on his reasoning behind his manipulating actions, thus strengthening Larson’s claim.

Collier describes Lizbeth’s father’s past nature: “My father was a strong man who could whisk a child upon his shoulders and go singing through the house. My father whittled toys for us, and laughed so loud the the great oak seemed to laugh with him.” In other words, her father has changed drastically since the memories Lizabeth is recalling and the descriptive language gives us the real and true picture to happy times, easier times. Additionally, the feeling of utter confusion and fear is showed when Collier uses descriptive words like “Everything was suddenly out of tune, like a broken accordion,” or “crowded with fear”. By using words like this and a very descriptive language, a reader truly is able to connect with the character and feel what they are

Basically, if Mitty had not made such awful decisions, the entire situation could have been avoided or lessened in suffering. In making the choices to sniff and touch

The struggle for Sarty is that he wants desperately to believe in his father’s innocence. But he also knows that the Justice of the Peace’s verdict was not right. He knows what his father has done and he is immensely grateful that he was not forced to testify against him. At this point Sarty is still fighting with himself to remain loyal to his father. He even attacks a “boy half again his size” (Faulkner 6) for calling out “Barn Burner” (Faulkner 6) as they leave the hearing.

In “Barn Burning” by William Faulkner, the unique style of narration adds depth to Sarty. Throughout Sarty’s journey, the narrator paints scenes with detailed descriptions of Sarty’s thoughts and emotions in both the present and future. One major example occurs as Sarty prepares to testify against his father and feels “as if he had swung outward at the end of a grape vine, over a ravine, and . . . had been caught in a prolonged instant of mesmerized gravity.” Here, the detailed narration examines Sarty’s psychological state, capturing his state of frozen panic through a vivid simile.

He is even more afraid of losing his father’s trust after Abner hits him “hard but with out heat”(280) not for telling the truth, but for wanting to. Sarty is conscious of the fact that if Abner knew his desire for “truth, justice, he would have hit”(280) him again and that Abner’s recommendation that he “learn to stick to” his “own blood or you ain’t going to have any blood to stick to you”(280) is more of a threat rather than fatherly advice. Sarty learns to stifle any qualms he has and overlook his own developing morals in order to defend his father’s cold-blooded attacks. In the face of Abner’s “outrage and savagery and lust”(286) and the ever-present conflict these emotional outbursts cause, Sarty’s sense of obligation to his father out weighs his desire to “run on and on and never look back”(286). He hopes being forced out of town will transform the side of Abner that possesses an “inherent [ly] voracious prodigality with material not his own”(279) and he will be satisfied once and for all. As father and son walk within sight of an impressive manor “big as a courthouse”(280) owned by Major de Spain, a wealthy landowner with whom Abner has struck a deal to farm corn on his land, Sarty knows at once that “they are safe from him”(280). His father’s “ravening”(281) envy could not possibly touch these “people whose lives are part of this peace and dignity”(281). But, Abner is seething with “jealous rage”(281) at the sight of the de Spain

Just outside the court room, after his father has been dismissed of all the charges, Sarty hears some boys calling his father a barn burner. Sarty quickly slips into a rage and begins a fight with these boys until he is knocked down by them and is taken away from the fight. This is when the importance of blood kin to Sarty becomes very clear. Sarty felt as though he was not just protecting his father's name and honor but also his own and that of his sisters and mother. The reader discovers Sarty knows of his father's guilt which is illustrated in the story by the following few lines "Forever he thought. Maybe he's done satisfied now, now that he has"(Faulkner 163) Sarty cannot complete this thought because it would bring forward the idea that not only is his father a barn burner but also that he has "already arranged to make a crop on another farm before he" (Faulkner 163) once again the reader gets cut off before his thought is completed which is simply that his father has been planning the burnings even to the extent of having a new farm to travel to before the land owner has ever crossed him. It is because of his love for his kin that Sarty is willing to shed his own blood in a fight with these boys even to defend a man that he knows is guilty of everything they have accused him of.

The author carefully crafts the story so that every detail contributes to a certain unique or single effect, whether it is as complex as irony or as simple as depiction of feelings. The Husband describes his absolute love for Ann as he reminisces about the years he spent with her and how deeply he "knows"

On the surface “Hands,” a passage from Sherwood Anderson's “Winesburg, Ohio,” is a tale about Wing Biddlebaum's struggle in concealing his hands that he is ashamed of because of a misunderstanding that has scared him and how he feels about his hands, even under his new name and town where his hands are welcomed and admired he is unable to face them. However; digging deeper into this story the reader finds the recurring theme of concealing versus revealing that works to highlight the tension between balance and imbalance in this story. Anderson uses many recurring images like light and dark, old and young, dreams, and hands to show how Biddlebaum's struggle with his hands is symbolic of the imbalance in his life created because of concealment.

Mitty’s second daydream occurs after he drives past a hospital on his way to the parking lot, he thinks he is a famous surgeon, heroic character, who saves the day. Mitty is awakened from his daydream only to be told by the parking attendant that he is entering the parking lot the wrong way. Third daydream, Mitty daydreams that he is a witness in a courtroom trial, walking down the street trying to remember the other item his wife instructed him to buy. The fourth and final daydream Mitty thinks he’s a captain in a war plane, he was awakened by his wife, Mrs. Mitty in a hotel lobby and confronted about not wearing his overshoes, and why he hiding in that particular chair, Mitty replies to his wife that does it ever occur to her that he is thinking. (Clugston, 2010).

Mitsy, comes from a different background, in the book. Even though Alice and Hart are friends to Mitsy, they treat Mitsy differently because she is a Japanese. “ [Mitsy] who had been our friend were now treated as aliens” Mitsy has to hide from everyone during the war, so they moved in to the Penrose’s house and lives in there. The war gets heated up until Michael doesn’t want them to live there as Mitsy and her mother might betray him. Another person affected in the war is Hart’s father,Michael.

The idioms of everyday American speech in a middle-class domestic situation are used in showing the events and relationships of the Berlin family. In contrast to the conversations of Becca and Stan, usually presented as straight dialogue, the discussions among the three sisters are conventionally presented, often with “she said” and other interpolations to give explicitly the emotional level of the sister’s disagreements. Madga, the Polish student who acts as Becca’s guide to the death camp site speaks fluent English but at times awkward English “Oh, they are much in appreciation” she says when given a pair of jeans. Contrast between the formal, traditional language of the fairy tale and childish, informal chatter is shown when the children comment or question as Gemma proceeds with her Briar Rose fairy tale story telling. Her contrast revisiting of just this one fairy tale shows the reader that while her conscious memory has buries the details of her past horrors, she cannot help returning to the fairy tale allegory. Contrast is also shown between the warm, happy imagery of life in the Berlin house and the bleak, harsh details of the holocaust.