Sep 7, 2008

Rip Van Winkle | Theme in Historical Context

Ozersky is a critic and essayist. In this essay, Ozersky puts the theme of Irving’s story in its historical context, seeing in the famous sleeper a symbol of a vanishing culture.

The story of Rip Van Winkle is known to almost everybody. Even more than Washington Irving’s other American fable, ‘‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’’ ‘‘Rip Van Winkle’’ is one of the few literary creations to have achieved truly mythic status. Natty Bumpo, Ichabod Crane, and even Tom Sawyer are well on the way to the glass museum case, there to rest alongside Peregrine Pickle, Uncle Remus, and the Five Chinese Brothers. But even a casual Nexis search reveals ‘‘Rip Van Winkle’’ alive and well, still being used in the most casual conversations on non-literary topics....