This study will examine Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle," focusing on how the story addresses the concept of the American Dream. Although the story is certainly ambiguous enough to be open to various interpretations in this context, the argument of the study will be that the story is meant to be a negative appraisal of the American Dream. However, the story is not a social, political, economic or otherwise ideological tract. The author is not intent on critiquing society as he sees it or as it is idealistically imagined in the American Dream. Instead, as all great literature is, the story contains and observes, with a compassionate heart, the plight of mortal human beings everywhere, in every land and every time, who must live their lives in far less than ideal circumstances, who must deal as best they can with such circumstances, who yearn for love or peace of mind or both, and who must then die.
There is, of course, much irony in comparing the story of a man who falls asleep for years and the view the story provides on the American Dream. At the same time, in making the connection, one must keep in mind that Rip Van Winkle himself is decidedly apolitical and that his falling asleep for years has more to do with his desire for rest and peace as an individual than as a creature of a particular society. He is, to the extent that his story and sleep touch all readers everywhere, Everyman, and not simply an American.
Rip is a lazy but good-hearted Dutch-American who lives with his perpetually nagging wife in a village in the years before the Revolutionary War. He does everything he can to avoid his own work, although he is more than willing to help others with theirs.
In this respect, he certainly stands in stark contrast to the ideal set up by Benjamin Franklin, for example, who emphasized hard work and industrious, economical living as a means to the American Dream of happiness and wealth. However, if Irving intends to...