Tag Archives: Rip Van Winkle

The Story of Rip Van Winkle Blog Post

Lucas Sparks

The story of Rip Van Winkle is one of the forerunners of the ghost story genre.  However, the significance of the story goes well beyond the introduction of a new genre.  One of the most notable aspects of the story is the unique way that the Revolution, which he overtly celebrates, is questioned and examined.  The story where one person, or a group of people in some cases, fall asleep and wake up hundreds of years later is actually fairly common in literary history.  One such instance of the story comes from Christian tradition with the story of “The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus”, recounting a group of early Christians who hid in a cave about 250 AD, to escape the persecution of Christians during the reign of the Roman emperor Decius.1

In this specific case, the time lapse is used to show two completely opposing ideas, and to ingrain in readers the idea that time’s natural progress will lead to the given outcome, verifying it as the correct way of thought.

While the version of the story from antiquity has more grim undertones throughout, one of the most endearing qualities of  the Rip Van Winkle story is the humor that goes along with the audacity of the situation.  His wife is essentially pestering him and his decision is to go up into the hills and sleep.  Another aspect of the story that solidifies the story as one of irony and humor is that even though some things have changed significantly over the course of twenty years, there is still the feeling that nothing important has changed.2 Especially coming from a character with such impassioned views about the Revolution he is trying to escape.

Washington Irving himself can almost be seen in the character he creates. As the scholar Martin Roth points out, Irving was a writer who was “favored by the gods” and lived a comfortable life with his works gaining increasing amounts of popularity.3  Having been translated into multiple languages and studied by scholars for decades, Irving’s stories continue to capture the attentions of readers with a unique and humorous view into the Revolution and how it changed the Nation in the every day life of a citizen.

  1. Surat Al-Kahf (18:9-26) – The Holy Qur’an
  2. Blakemore, Steven. “Family Resemblances: The Texts and Contexts of ‘Rip Van Winkle.'” Early American Literature 35, no. 2 (2000): 18712.
  3. Roth, Martin. Comedy and America: The Lost World of Washington Irving. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.