Notes on 
Washington Irving 
"Rip Van Winkle"

• A yarn is something we are told but not expected to believe. He creates a yarn by his way of introducing the story with a narrative frame. The narrative frame works something like a picture frame, to go around it.  Most stories start with the story, but he puts it in a frame telling how he came to find the story. He says he found the story in a trunk passes down by men.  The more remote a story is from the original source, the less reliable it is. This story is similar to the stories of the hook and the kidney. He makes his story remote from something we can rely on.
  
• Rip Van Winkle is the American icon of someone lazy, shiftless, and low class. Americans sometimes don't love the lower class but have negative portrayals of them, especially during the last couple of decades. 
  
• This story is sympathetic to the lower class.  Irving creates a loveable scoundrel - Huck Finn is a similar hero.  Rip is a good ole' boy who doesn't like to do much work. Or any at all.  He responds to his nagging wife by running away, and she responds to this by nagging more. Theirs is a dysfunctional household. The story is not sympathetic to Dame Van Winkle, but who would want a husband or father who did not provide? Generally we don't respect this kind of man. There is an ironic tone; we know that he is shiftless and sorry, but we still like the man.
  
• He goes hunting and finds Dutch dwarves. The dwarves are an etiological myth explaining the source of thunder.  Mythology believes Zeus caused thunder. To the Dutch, thunder was caused by a game of nine pins. Rip Van Winkle gets drunk or ripped. When he wakes up 20 years have passed. Irving does this to show what has happened to the nation over these 20 years. It gives them the opportunity to explore the contrast of the cultural changes. This is a popular technique also used in Austin Powers. While he was gone, the nation changed entire methods of government from being under King George to George Washington. He comes home on election day and they think he is there to break up the election. When they ask if he is a federal or a democrat, he replies that he was a supporter of the king. They thought he was a Tory or a spy. Rip is not a Tory or spy but simply did not comprehend the change.
  
• His wife died from an aneurysm while screaming at a peddler. She had not changed any. Rip finds comfort in his wife's death.  Comforted that she is dead, that is. When he asks if anyone had heard of Rip Van Winkle, they point to his son who is just like he was, shiftless and lazy. Rip sees himself in his son and is confused about who he really is.
  
• Rip's story of his account changes as he tells it. This is part of the frame that makes the story not to be believed. This concluding frame draws into question what happened. In early America, there were women called grass widows. Grass widows were those whose husbands left home without divorce when they got tired of their wife and children. It was easier then to change your name and identity to get away from the old things.