Why Does The Poor Relation And Walter

Mitty Choose To Escape From Reality The Way They Do Essay, Research Paper

Why do the poor relation and Walter Mitty choose to escape from reality the way they do. How successful are they.

The short stories of Walter Mitty and the poor relation are in many ways very similar. They both escape to this imaginary life through one way or another. The poor relation escapes in the context of a story he is telling to family and freinds. To start with he tells us his life story ,but this gradually changes so his life s outcome is very different to reality. He tells us of the changes he would like to make to his life, and his regrets. He makes them become vivid and entertaining by pretending that in fact these imaginary events actually occurred and he is actually a very different person to that one his friends and family imagine him to be.

However Walter Mitty escapes by regularly daydreaming. He imagines and almost believes that his life is very different in a number of contrasting ways. His daydreams are not about his regrets, or aspects of his life. They are instead about almost impossible dreams that stretch the borders of reality because they are so diverse. This shows that Walter Mitty has a far larger imagination than that of poor relations. It is because of this these daydreams are both exciting and unrealistic. He perhaps realizes that because he is daydreaming he doesn t have to make all his stories plausible and this results in far more unbelievable dreams.

Walter Mittys real life is very uneventful. In the story we see him going shopping and doing errands while his wife gets her hair cut. This seems to be something that they do often. The main problem in his life at the moment is whether or not to buy overshoes. This is a perfect example of the tediousness that Walter Mitty has to deal with. We also see that his wife likes to boss Walter around. His constant daydreams into another world mean that Walter often makes mistakes such as driving too fast or not being able to park. It is because of this many people underestimate him or treat him as inferior. He feels unwanted and this makes him paranoid resulting in a further need to escape into another world where peoples opinion of him is very different.

In the poor relations story we see a similar but still very different picture. While the poor relations life is still very uneventfulhe has a different kind of reality. He follows the same routine every day. He has no job and rents a room he can only stay in at night. He eats the same food every day and can t afford often even the most basic of things such as fuel for the fire. He spends his days in London doing nothing. He s says in the beginning ” I never met with any particular success in anything”. However we feel that he has a considerable lack of ambition to achieve anything more than this. Deeper down he has a serious lack of self confidence stopping him from trying to achieve more in life. However unlike Walter mitty he is looked down upon for a different reason. Rather than the tendency to daydream and make mistakes the poor relation has serperated himself from normal life and has instead chosen the path of isolation. A very lonely and poor man it is not necessarily the boredom of life which he dislikes but that he is not really socially acceptable. He has no wife,family or friends. He feels that people do not enjoy his company and he brings shame on those he does know. This is said in the quote ” a person so unimportant to the family as I am”.

Walter Mitty is an escapist. He escapes from his ordinary life by daydreaming about being things he could never be.. However he may not be aware exactly what he is escaping from. Walter has done with his life what is socially acceptable and what he was advised to do. But this has resulted in this trivail life and also being bossed around by his wife. The mistakes walter makes all too often cause people to pity him and Walter does not like this. From the beginning his wife is telling him off for driving too fast. She says ” it s one of your days, I wish you d let Dr Renshaw look you over”. She also tells him to get overshoes even though he didn t want them. He then gets told of by a cop for driving at the red light and has to let the parking attendant put away the car because he couldn t do it and the parking attendant is short tempered with him . He then comes up with a plot to pretend he s injured so in the future when he can t fix something there s no need for someone to humiliate him if they have to help. This implies that not only do people humiliate him but he is actually paranoid of becoming embarrassed of these mistakes. To escape from it Walter daydreams only causing himself more problems. Walter can improve his life by not daydreaming, and therefore making fewer mistakes causing a better quality of life that he does not need to escape from.

On the other hand if what Walter dreams about really are his unobtainable ambitions he can improve his quality of life. In his dreams he wishes to became anything from a navy pilot to a world class surgeon, an accused top criminal or a fighter pilot and Walter Mitty undefeated, inscrutable to the last! While these are all unobtainable ambitions they carry a pattern. All these careers Walter wishes for carry a sense of respect and they involve Walter being the best at what he does. So while we perhaps think that he wants to do all of t