![]() ![]() The humour of the story – chiefly in Rip Van Winkle being a henpecked husband – also supports this analysis of the story. Rip’s son is his ‘ditto’, or spitting image: the next generation is much the same as the last. The name of the pub may have changed – to represent the shift from one George to another, from King George to George Washington – but life for these simple villagers is largely the same as it was before. ![]() When he gets back to his village, although several of his friends have died – one presumably in the war itself – the others have survived, and he soon goes back to sitting and gossiping with them outside of the pub where they used to chatter together. Rip Van Winkle manages to sleep right through it, which is quite a feat when you think about what a noise there must have been. One interpretation is that Irving, through this light-hearted tale, is actually trying to downplay the American Revolution. Why did Irving recycle this old plot device for his story about the American Revolution? And how should we interpret the story? ![]() Like Irving’s story, it features a man from a simple village who discovers some strange men drinking in the woods like Irving’s story, the hero falls asleep after partaking of their drink, and, like Irving’s story, he wakes up to find twenty years have passed. But the clearest influence was Johann Karl Christoph Nachtigal’s German folktale ‘Peter Klaus’. ![]()
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