Book Report of Rip Van Winkle
Rip Van Winkle is a famous work of Washington Irving, an American writer in the 19th century, who hankered for rural life and ancient lifestyle. And he particularly paid attention to anecdotes and the customs of remote villages.
The background of Rip Van Winkle is a small village of America in colonial period. The story is about the life and strange experience of the main character Rip Van Winkle. Rip was a simple good-natured man, a kind neighbor and an obedient hen-pecked husband. He was willing to help his neighbors without hesitation but he hated to do any work to make money. On the contrary, his wife was very bad-tempered and liked to yell at him. To avoid the scold of his wife he went to the woods with a gun and his dog. Then he met some strange men and he taste a kind of beverage, and then he fell into a deep sleep. When he awaked, it was twenty years later but he thought it was the second day. When he went to home, he found that everything changed, the life in his memory became history and the present time is unfamiliar to him.
In this story, Irving successfully shaped two distinctive characters, Rip and wife and he used humorous languages which made this story more attractive to readers. There were a large number of popular folk orals and slangs in his work.
There are three themes we can find in this article. First is the appreciation of the peaceful natural world. Irving wrote peaceful village, the leisurely life of Rip, the beautiful scenery and he described an easy life of Rip in the end. The second is the irony of the backward ideas in the old times. From the busy villagers, the greatly changed countryside, the indifferent dog, the new topic among people and the derision from strangers, Rip found that he gained no satisfaction from his twenty year’s escape and he even lost a lot. The third is that we should keep the old tradition and value as things are developing. In the story, an old man recognized Rip and Rip met his son, daughter and grandchildren, which both showed that radical changes are sometimes necessary to move society forward; lasting changes is an amalgam of the old and new,
although things changed, the links with the past still remained.
The story is full of conflicts. We can see the conflicts between past and present, old and new, leisure and work, innocence and experience, which form the first theme and the second theme.
From this story, we can also learn something about Washington Irving. It is easy to find that he is a little bit conservative so he expressed his desire to the peaceful and natural lifestyle. And in his opinion, the society and the natural environment did not become more harmonious but more conflicting. He did notice that the world had gotten progress, but he felt that individual spirit did not get essential free development during this progress.