Rip Van Winkle Essay Thesis

Irving wrote this story in 1820, a time when in a literary sense, America was still considered a replica of Britain.Romantic literature in America was just starting to grow and people were striving for more Romantic writing.

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After serving the strangers from the keg, Van Winkle takes a drink and falls into a deep slumber, waking twenty years later to find his town unrecognizable.

Irving draws from the momentous events that occur during Van Winkle’s twenty-year slumber: the character falls asleep prior to the American Revolutionary War and awakens in a new nation.

Van Winkle’s return to his indolent ways after waking up indicates that he is out of sync with postwar ideals of productivity and industry, allowing Irving’way of contrasting 19th-century American attitudes with pre-war sentiments. He had lived in a miniature ancient village that might have the very first Dutch settlers established long-long before the American Revolution started, while America was still composed of the Thirteen Colonies of Great Britain.

The short story Rip Van Winkle written initially by Washington Irving is a short tale that symbolizes many of the significant traits and values of American mythology to this day.

In addition to the setting, the events that occur within Rip Van Wrinkle prove to show that the story holds tremendous values to Mythology.

For instance, the main character Rip falls into a deep sleep for many years and wakes up to practically a whole new world in front of him. Google(); req('single_work'); $('.js-splash-single-step-signup-download-button').one('click', function(e){ req_and_ready('single_work', function() ); new c. How does a short story that is based on borrowed ideas come to be one of the most widely read and loved pieces of American literature?The answer is simple, by using memorable characters to convey a message of freedom and identity to a nation that was just starting to discover both.In Rip Van Winkle, Washington Irving uses the characters to show his ideals as a romantic, and to represent the new found independence of a budding country.When Rip wakes up, he mentions “I have not slept here all night” which explains he has been sleeping in that spot for a very long time.The exaggeration of these years in a deep sleep reveals its mythological influence throughout the tale.This want as well as a new identity for the American people were granted when Irving wrote Rip Van Winkle, a story about a man who slept through the Revolutionary War.Just like many other great works such as The Great Gatsby, a novel in which F.Scott Fitzgerald used his characters to show the corruption of the American Dream, Irving used his characters to show his ideals as a romantic.The main character in this story, Rip Van Winkle, was himself an embodiment of the notion of Romantic freedom.