Books like Rip Van Winkle

"Rip Van Winkle" is considered by some critics to be one of the finest early American short stories. Almost everyone knows the basic story, but I'd guess not all that many people have actually read Washington Irving's original story. **Warning: if you're one of those vanishingly rare people who's not familiar with this story, there are major spoilers after the next picture below.** It took a little digging to find the full original version of this old story online; it turns out that it's included in a collection of stories by Washington Irving called The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., available for free at Gutenberg here. Rip van Winkle is a villager living in New York state, just before the American Revolution in the 1770s. He's also a layabout who likes hunting and hanging out at the tavern with friends, but not so much working on his farm. I had never realized how totally useless as a husband Rip Van Winkle was, and how extremely shrewish his wife was. Rip is willing to help anyone else but is a complete failure at providing for his own family; his wife spends every waking moment nagging and yelling at him. They make each other completely miserable. So it's almost for the best when one day Rip goes walking in the mountains and meets up with a group of outlandish men playing nine-pins and drinking from a flagon. Rip helps himself to their liquor, and eventually falls into a drunken sleep. Twenty years later he wakes up and makes his way back to his village, to find that America is now independent from Britain, his children have grown, his wife has died, and he can now sit around and be lazy in peace, respected as a patriarch of the village and a symbol of the old times. I've looked at some critics' analyses of "Rip Van Winkle," and there are some intriguing ideas about what this story means: * A symbol of America's escape from British rule, with Britain playing the role of the mean, despotic wife. * A commentary on how the more things change, the more they stay the same. * A cautionary tale about people who live irresponsible lives and rely on other people to take care of them:Rip's daughter took him home to live with her; she had a snug, well-furnished house, and a stout cheery farmer for a husband, whom Rip recollected for one of the urchins that used to climb upon his back. As to Rip's son and heir, who was the ditto of himself, seen leaning against the tree, he was employed to work on the farm; but evinced an hereditary disposition to attend to any thing else but his business.It is interesting how Rip's passive personality doesn't really change over the course of the story. The news that his wife has died affects his life much more than the news of the American Revolution.The character of the shrewish wife is one-dimensional, but the more I think about Rip Van Winkle and how he reacts (or fails to react) to life and the events around him, the more I'm intrigued with this story. In fact, the process of writing this review convinced me to up my rating from 3 stars to 4. There's more here than initially meets the eye. It's an interesting character analysis as well as a fun story.