Rip Van Winkle

It has been a long while since I've been able to post anything that I figured now I would take the time to explain what I thought of the first fiction piece we read in class. "Rip Van Winkle" by Washington Irving was a remarkable piece of fiction so much so that I can't believe I missed it up until now -- surely, I had heard of it before, though I never had the chance to read it. Written for the collection entitled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Canyon, "Rip Van Winkle" is about a man who leaves his life behind to travel into the Catskill Mountains. Here he encounters a Dutch man whose group he joins to start drinking moonshine, and falls asleep for twenty years, soon returning to his town and recognizing no one. It certainly was a novel idea for the time and could even be told using an in media res introduction and still be effective. From reading and comprehending it, I feel I've been able to make out a valuable theme that the author may or may not have been intending: that life is too short so we shouldn't sleep too much or we may miss out on a lot. Just the plot alone got me to perceive the story as such, which is why I think "Rip Van Winkle" is certainly among the best works we've read thus far.