This creates a sad, joyful, frightening.This results in the reader experiencing….This connotes a sense of (melancholy, sorrowful) feelings for the reader.

This further elucidates (disconsolate, sad, melancholic) emotions to the reader.This invokes feelings of X in the reader.Here are some better phrases to use instead of 'makes the reader': The reason for that is writing 'this makes the reader.' makes it look like you haven't put much thought into your writing and shows a lack of analysis of the text.

This is a phrase that all too often slips out without much thought and it is one that teachers are sick of seeing in essays. Then, with that faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last.How to avoid always writing ' this makes the reader' all the time Thurber continues: “He took one last drag on his cigarette and snapped it away. “To hell with the handkerchief,” Mitty imagines saying. Unlike Nik Worth, whose elaborate rock star fantasies drive Dana Spiotta’s 2011 novel “Stone Arabia,” Mitty’s inner landscape is no richer than his day-to-day existence he is not enlarged by his dreams but only reminded of how small he is.Įven at story’s end, when he pretends that he is bravely awaiting execution, it is cliché that moves him, the stuff of Hollywood, and not of life. That, to me, is the center of the story, which is less about redemption than it is about resignation, about the imagination not so much as refuge as retreat. “It’s forty kilometers through hell,” a sergeant tells him. Thus, a set of photos in Liberty magazine “of bombing planes and of ruined streets” (it was the dawn of World War II) leads Mitty to imagine himself as an Army captain on a suicide mission at the front. He is lonely, lost, an anonymous man of middle age whose fantasies (Navy pilot, brilliant surgeon) are triggered by his glancing interactions with the world. The entire story takes place over the course of an afternoon, as Mitty - henpecked, never fully present - drops his wife off at the hairdresser and then runs a couple of errands (buying overshoes and dog biscuits) before meeting up with her again in the lobby of a hotel.

I understand the logic - you need action in a movie - but I can’t help thinking that it’s antithetical to what the story is about.įor Thurber, Mitty is a tragic figure … or no, not tragic, because that would imply a stature that he doesn’t have. This recalls the earlier adaptation, in which Kaye, as Mitty, also steps outside himself, getting enmeshed in an adventure involving stolen jewels.

The secret life of walter mitty thurber