Rip Van Winkle Essay Research Paper English

Rip Van Winkle Essay, Research Paper

English 251

Rip Van Winkle

“Rip Van Winkle” is about a man named Rip Van Winkle, who lived in a little Dutch town in the Hudson Valley. Everyone in the town was very fond of him because he would help anyone who needed help and he would play with the children. The thing he couldn’t do was tend to his farm because it seemed that everything he did failed, so he would go out and fish or go to the town inn and listen to the gossip. His wife Dame Van Winkle would get angry at him for being lazy and not tending to the farm. One day he decided that he had one option to get away from his wife and the farm, which was to take his gun and dog and go into the woods and hunt squirrels.

He spent all day looking for squirrels, but couldn’t find any. So he lied on the grass and after awhile he noticed it was getting dark, so he started back. As he did this, he heard someone calling his name and then he saw a ghost appear carrying a keg of liquor on his back. So they both went together down the woods until they came to this opening where they saw these weird dressed people playing 9 pin. Rip and the ghost walked up towered them and the ghost poured liquor into the flasks for the people to drink and Rip started to drink too until he passed out on the ground. The next mourning he woke up and didn’t know what to tell his wife. He reached for

his gun, but all he saw was a rusted out gun instead of the well oiled, shiny gun. Then he looked for his dog and he couldn’t find his dog.

So he went back in town and everyone stared at him like they didn’t know him. He looked at himself to see what everyone was staring at and he saw that he had a beard a foot long. He looked around the village and nothing was familiar, even his house which looked like a run-down shack. He went to the tavern to see if he recognized anyone, which he didn’t. Then he started calling the his friends names to see if anyone has heard of them and they all said that they were have moved on or dead. Then he asked if they have heard of the name Rip Van Winkle and they all pointed to his son, which looked just like him. This made Rip think that he had woke up someone else because his son looked just like him.

Then a woman with a child in her arms came to see the man. Rip had overheard the name of the child was Rip and he asked her who was her father and she said her father was Rip Van Winkle, who left when she was a child twenty years ago. Then Rip told her that he was her father and the woman recognize him and she took him home to live with her. After that, he had learn about everything that has happed the past twenty years of his lost life before he was able to learn the new gossip, which he eventually learned.

Rip Van Winkle helped me to understand what is must be like to wake up and no one knowing who you are. It must have been scary for Rip to have to feel like he was alone because he did not know anyone. I was glad to see his daughter come up to him and tell him he was his daughter because that way Rip would not be alone then.