The word "derided" most closely resembles the word "mocked." To deride means to laugh at in contempt or to mock. In this passage, we learn that the character feels himself to be a creature driven and derided, or mocked, by vanity. If we are not able to look a word up in the dictionary, context clues can often give us an inclination as to what the meaning of the word might be.
You can have a story bout inanimate objects coming to life for example veggietales where the characters are vegetables and they do human things everyday.
