Reality is always interfering with the intense and detailed daydreams of Walter Mitty. In the opening sequence he imagines himself as a pilot guiding his "eight-engined Navy hydroplane" through a bad storm verging on being a hurricane. Just at the highest point of the action, Mitty is brought back to his mundane life when his wife nags at him not to drive so fast. They are on their way into Waterbury to run errands. His wife insists that Mitty needs to have a doctor look at him.
Likewise, after his daydream about being a famous surgeon who saves the day during an important operation on a millionaire banker, Mitty is shocked back to reality by a parking lot attendant who is warning Walter that he is going into the wrong lane. These abrupt awakenings do not prevent Mitty from sinking back into a third daydream sparked by a headline recited by a newspaper boy. This time he is on trial for murder and has just struck the district attorney, saying, "You miserable cur..." This reference to "cur," a derogatory name for a dog, jogs Mitty out of this fantasy as he remembers his wife wanted him to buy puppy biscuits at the market.
In his next daydream he is Captain Mitty, a World War I flier, attempting to destroy an enemy ammunition dump amidst heavy antiaircraft fire. This time Mitty is startled away from his heroics by his wife striking his shoulder and nagging about how she had been looking all over for him. In the last daydream he is placed before a firing squad but there is no shock back to reality in the text. Thurber may have meant that Mitty was simply the noble hero proudly accepting his fate which was not really the firing squad, but rather his interminable life as a henpecked husband.
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