Rip Van Winkle

“Rip Van Winkle” by Washington Irving.
The plot of this story would dramatically change if the element of fantasy was to be taken out. In the beginning of the story the author describes in detail the villiage which lies at the bottom of the Kaatskill Mountains which is the home of Rip Van Winkle. “In that same, village, and in one of these very houses,(which, to tell the precise truth, was sadly time worn and weather beaten,) there lived many years since, while the country was yet a province of Great Britain, a simple good natured fellow, of the name Rip Van Winkle”.(954) Rip Van Winkle   was a man who was loved by the people and adored by the children. He was the type of man who would go out of his way to help others with their things but at the same time wasn’t interested in the keeping up of his own place. He would do things for the wives of the village that their own husbands wouldn’t do. “He would never even refuse to assist a neighbor in the roughest toil, and was a foremost man at all country frolicks for husking Indian corn, or building stone fences; the women of the village, too, used to employ him to run errands, and to do such little odd jobs as their less obliging husbands would not do for them;-in a word, Rip was ready to attend to any body’s business but his own; but as to doing family duty, and keeping his farm in order. It was impossible”. The plot would suffer the most because without the plot there would have been no story to tell. In reality   no   person would sleep for 20 years or 18 as the story stated unless it was by being in that one state that a human body acknowledges as a “coma’. ““Rip bethought himself a moment, and inquired, “where’s Nicholas Vedder?” There was a silence for a little while, when an old man replied, into thin piping voice, Nicholas Vedder? Why he is dead and gone these eighteen. years! [continues]

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