Washington Irving and Samuel Clemens - Essay Example

Washington Irving and Samuel Clemens Washington Irving and Samuel Clemens are both accomplished American who used humor in their writing. In “Rip Van Winkle,” Irving tells the story of a somewhat lazy man who falls asleep in the Kaatskill Mountains and wakes up twenty years later to find that the American Revolution has taken place. Clemens’ story “Cannibalism in the Cars” is about the tall-tale an old retired politician tells a stranger he meets about the time he and a group of men were trapped on a train in a snowstorm and resorted to cannibalism.

In both stories, the humor of far-fetched and seemingly unbelievable stories is used to explain what the authors consider an important point for the reader to understand. Irving starts off “Rip Van Winkle” with the reader having no suspicions of the fairytale-like twist that arrives later in the story. He describes the beauty of the Kaatskills as “swelling up to a noble height” (18) and Van Winkle as a “simple, good-natured man” (19) who would “take the world easy, eat white bread or brown…and would rather starve on a penny than work for a pound” (20).

So despite being laid back to the point of laziness and having a wife who was widely considered a nasty and mean woman, Rip Van Winkle is well-loved by his neighbors and seen as a source of amusement to the children. He walks in the Kaatskills with his dog to get away from his wife and soak in the scenery. Again, nothing here seems out of place. Until suddenly the Dutch-looking dwarves arrive in a clearing, drinking heavily and bowling. Rip Van Winkle drinks with them, falls asleep, and by the time he wakes up, twenty years have passed.

The story’s sudden turn into fantasy should seem out of place and make no sense to the reader, but since Irving continues to use the same descriptive and matter-of-fact language he’d been using throughout the rest of the story, the readers believe it – even if laughing at the idea of a man waking up with a long beard not knowing that twenty years had gone by. It is understood that if anyone could be lazy enough to sleep for twenty years, it would be Rip Van Winkle. In fact, once back in his village and living with his daughter, Van Winkle “arrived at that happy age when a man can be idle with impunity” (31) – something Van Winkle did even as a much younger man.

Samuel Clemens’ takes the same approach as Irving in “Cannibalism in the Cars.” The old man at the train station telling the story sounds perfectly sane as he gives the details surrounding the snowstorm that trapped the train with its “crested waves of a stormy sea”(111) and the hunger that “dawned up as gaunt and haggard and hopeless a company of men as ever stood in the shadow of death” (112). And after seven days of hunger, it is even understandable to the reader that the starving men may think of cannibalism.

What is not as plausible is the way they form a congressional body to debate, vote, re-vote, and re-debate who will be eaten – in language that sounds like the pompous and formal operations of Congress. A conversation that is essentially each man saying “not it!” turns into sentences like: “The gentleman from Oregon is old, and furthermore is bulky only in bone – not in flesh” (114). Even funnier is the old man’s meal to meal description of everyone he ate, which with lines like “he was a perfect gentleman, and singularly juicy” (116) reads like a restaurant review.

Despite how far-fetched this idea of cannibalism is, the narrator of the story believe the old man, saying, “I did not doubt his word; I could not question a single item in a statement so stamped with the earnestness of truth as his” (117). This is the same feeling and for the same reason the readers of Irving and Clemens believe the stories, or at least go along with the fantastic turns each story takes. The writers have done an excellent job making these stories feel very real. So what points were Irving and Clemens trying to make by using fantastical humor in their stories?

For Irving, the point was that it is possible to be so lazy and uninvolved in the world around you that you literally might have well been asleep for twenty years. Van Winkle had no involvement in the American Revolution because he’d been asleep, but the reader is left thinking that had he been awake, the result would have been the same. And with Clemens’ “Cannibalism in the Cars,” the idea is that politicians will argue, debate, and ultimately justify their every action as elected officials, right down to eating each other.

Clemens’ last line in the story is as tongue-in-check as it gets: “I felt inexpressibly relieved to know that I had only been listening to the harmless vagaries of a madman instead of the genuine experiences of a bloodthirsty cannibal” (117). Is it really better to have a madman in elected office rather than a cannibal? Or is the joke that Congress is both mad and willing to eat each other to survive politically? Either way, it is funny and leaves the reader with something to think about.