A Man Called 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. All the people in the town was very fond of him because he would help anyone who needed his help and he would play with the children. The thing he didn't do was tend to his farm because it seemed that everything he did had 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 very upset at him for being lazy and not tending to the farm. One day he decided that he had an option to get away from his wife and the farm business, which was for him to take his gun and dog and go into the woods and hunt squirrels.

He spent all day looking for squirrels, but didn't find any. So he laid on the grass and after awhile he noticed it was getting very dark, so he started back home. As he did this, he heard someone calling out his name and then he saw a ghost appear carrying a keg of liquor on its back. So him and the ghost went together down the woods until they came to an opening where they saw these weird dressed people playing a game of 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 forhis gun, but all he saw was a rusted gun instead of the well oiled, shiny gun. Then he looked for his dog and he didn't see his dog.So he went back into the 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 noticed that he had a beard that was a foot long. He looked around the village and nothing was familiar either, even his house looked like a run-down shack. He went to the tavern to see if he recognized anyone there, which he didn't. Then he started calling his friends names to see if anyone has heard of them and they all said they had 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 like him. This made Rip think that he had woke up someone else because his son looked exactly like him.

Then all of a sudden 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 the father and she said her father was Rip Van Winkle, who left when she was a child twenty years ago. Finally 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 everything that has happened in the past twenty years of his lost life before he was able to learn the gossip, which he eventually learned.

Rip Van Winkle helped me to understand what it was like to wake up somewhere and not know anyone or be in a daze and also not know the people around me. It must have been scary for Rip to have to feel like he was all alone, because he didn't know anyone. I was glad to see that his daughter came up to him and told him that she was his daughter because the way Rip was feeling and looking he would have been alone (Literature).

Works Cited

Rip van winkle.Literature, The Norton Anthology of American. Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle . 8th. Vol. B. Nina Byam, General Editor, Robert S. Levine, Associate General Editor, 2012.

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