Rip Van Winkle: the Passive Protagonist - Essay Example

On the surface, Washington Irving’s A Posthumous Writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker appears to be a fairy tale that requires the reader to willingly suspend his disbelief. However, further reading gives it a deeper meaning. Rip Van Winkle, the protagonist of the story, has an out-of-the-ordinary experience in Catskill Mountain and falls sleeps for twenty years.

He returns to his village to find the old order of things changed by the American Revolution. When we consider that the story has been plotted so that the protagonist is absent during such a momentous period of American history, it is evident that the author is attempting to convey a particular message to the reader. I believe that Washington Irving’s purpose in writing Rip Van Winkle is to assert that the old, even when it is not a catalyst of change, can serve as a cherished and valuable agent of continuity with the new.

Rip Van Winkle is a passive protagonist but retains his relevance until the end of the narrative. Rip Van Winkle is “a simple, good-natured fellow” who is “pliant and malleable” (Washington, 2011, p.32), in his dealings with his fellow men. He is a favorite of the women and popular with the village children as a playmate and storyteller. Although he fritters away his inheritance and neglects the needs of his family, the author sympathetically paints him in pleasant hues of “perfect contentment” (Washington, 2011, p 33), and appears to justify his flights into idleness by blaming his “ termagant wife” (Washington, 2011, p.32). When Van Winkle returns after his twenty-year absence, the old village of “phlegm and drowsy tranquility” (Washington, 2011, p.37) has been transformed into a new hive of bustling activity.

He laments that “everything’s changed, and I’m changed,” (Washington, 2011, p.39), but he remains unchanged, and retains his characteristic passivity - of doing nothing. However, he becomes “reverenced as one of the patriarchs of the village, and a chronicle of the old times” (Washington, 2011, p. 40). He remains the idler and storyteller but comes to represent continuity. Despite remaining a passive spectator to the events unfolding in the village, Irving makes hin the bridge between the past and the present and retains his worth until the end of the story.

Rip Van Winkle’s passivity is in direct contrast to the proactive character of Young Goodman Brown in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s eponymous story. Brown actively makes “more haste on his present evil purpose” (Hawthorne, 2011. p. 123) to keep his appointment with the devil. Both the protagonists undertake a perilous journey, tinged with contact with the supernatural. But, while Van Winkle returns unchanged to a changed world, Brown comes back to his unchanged village as “a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man” (Hawthorne, 2011. p. 137).

Young Goodman Brown allows the devil to rage in his breast and becomes “the chief horror” (Hawthorne, 2011. p. 134) of the story, ending his life in “gloom” (Hawthorne, 2011. p.137) and alienation from his world. Rip Van Winkle, unscathed by his midnight adventure, comes to embody everything good in the past and retains his “universal popularity,” (Washington, 2011, p.32) as a link with the days gone by, while Young Goodman Brown fades into dark despair. Rip Van Winkle emerges as a worthy protagonist in Irving’s narrative.

However, his passivity does not seem to merit such a sympathetic portrayal by the author. Van Winkle does nothing to earn the respected status bestowed on him by the author. If Irving’s purpose is to make him an esteemed symbol of the good, simple, and innocent past, this purpose is undermined by the fact that the author also makes his protagonist idle, purposeless, and unacceptably submissive. Rip Van Winkle contributes nothing appreciable to the village before or after the Revolution and, as such, it is difficult to sympathize with Washington Irving’s purpose in making him a link between the past and the present.