The Secret Life of Walter Mitty Essay Example for Free

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty Essay The two short stories I am going to be comparing are The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Young Goodman Brown. At first, these two stories might seem very different but they many similar themes. Both stories have the main character hallucinating about different situations. In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Walter Mitty wishes to hallucinate to escape reality and be part of an unreal world. In Young Goodman Brown, Goodman Brown, the main character was forced into seeing something not though of as being real by a stranger he met in the middle of the woods. Another similarity between both stories was that the main characters in both the stories had spouses who affected them throughout their lives. The most important reason that I will be comparing both these stories is because they both follow a general plot, leaving the main character very unhappy at the end. In Young Goodman Brown, Goodman Brown leaves his wife and heads for the village. There, he meets a devil figure and they both continue the journey. Goodman Brown does get a feeling of turning around and heading back home, but keeps going after seeing some of his townspeople in the woods. After getting to a secluded spot, he sees that most of the townspeople are also going to a meeting to crossover to the evil side. Goodman then sees his wife among the crowd and screams her name out and tries to tell her to look towards heaven and resist the evil. As he screams that statement to his wife, Faith, everything around him goes away and hes in the forest all by himself. He wonders if what happened was a dream or a reality. He thinks that what he saw was not a dream and lives his life from that point onwards thinking it was real. Walter Mitty hallucinates in a different way in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Having a dominating wife who never lets him as he pleases, he escapes his existing life daydreaming about adventures. If daydreaming were an illness, his would be diagnosed as life threatening. It was so serious that if he were to pass a hospital, he would start imagining being a very famous surgeon practicing an extremely complicated procedure. His unrealistic experiences ranged from being a commanding officer on a ship in bad weather, to a famous trial lawyer, as well as a courageous member in the armed forces. In the time range of dropping his wife to the hairdresser to meeting up with her when she was done, he had gone through four different illusions. The hallucinations between both the characters are very different. Walter Mitty knows that what he experiences are daydreams and never real, but he is not bothered because he is very content with escaping his current life. He also has short dreams which most of the time never make it to a conclusion. On the other hand, Goodman Brown didnt even know if what he had experienced in the forest was real or a bad dream. However, being so confused, he took it as not being a dream and went on with his life. Logically speaking, it was most likely a dream, and the length of his dream was a lot longer that Walters. He also didnt enjoy the pleasure of that kind of a dream, because he felt very uncomfortable when he realized that he was in the forest by himself after what he had witnessed. He also was not able to finish his hallucination completely, leaving it up to question if Faith, his wife ever did cross and join the evil.