Word: thurberism
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...focal character of most Thurber-prose and drawings is a reticent, befuddled, thwarted little man who tries sadly to preserve himself and his reason against a practically worldwide onslaught. Grim psychiatrists, gadgets that "whir and whine and whiz," erratic servants, domineering women, unfriendly dogs, ghosts, foreigners -all are in league to crush the Thurber Male. This harried biped, like Joyce's Leopold Bloom or Mann's Hans Castorp, represents 20th-century Man. To Thurber's devotees, who rate him the greatest U.S. humorist since Mark Twain, his blankly exaggerated reports of their own qualms and misadventures...
Flight from Reality. The Thurber Carnival is a well-edited selection of Thurber's stuff (he selected it himself). Most of it appeared originally in the New Yorker. The anthology includes stories from My World and Welcome to It, My Life and Hard Times (his best book, reprinted complete), The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze, and drawings from Fables for Our Time, The Owl in the Attic, Men, Women and Dogs, and The War Between Men and Women...
Occasionally, a Thurber Male copes with dreadful reality by fleeing from it. Walter Mitty (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty) is, in his escape, the dauntless Commander Mitty ("Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8,500! We're going through!"). He is also the world-famed Dr. Mitty, taking over the crucial operation when other specialists are baffled, and the Defendant Mitty who is afraid of nobody...
...servants in Thurber's world are never servants one can deal with reasonably. They are agents of the devil, users of abracadabra, alarming in their slightest gesture. "They are here with the reeves," said Delia, his colored maid. "The lawn is full of fletchers," she announced on another occasion. Barney Haller, the Thurber handy man, had "thunder following him like a dog." His language, like Delia's, was from the nether world. "Dis morning bime by I go hunt grotches in de voods...
...Existence of Evil. Thurber is as sensitively aware of the existence of evil -i.e., of stupidity and cowardice and self-love-as any American writer of his time. The knowledge pervades his lightest work; and in one small corner of his world, in such stories as The Cane in the Corridor and The Breaking Up of the Winship, evil unmasks itself in grim tragedy...