Rip Van Winkkle Tone Analysis

Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle is a story with great meaning. Looking from the outside in it seems as though the story is merely for a child. Although, this can seem true, Rip Van Winkle is a story with a very credible moral and many literary techniques. Focusing on the tone is just a fraction of literary examples Irving incorporates into his short story. Irving seems to have not only one, but three different attitudes in Rip Van Winkle. It is also known that Washington Irving uses tones that directly relate to his real life-events. Because Irving was conforming to the new age of Romanticism, he used an American Romantic tone in Rip Van Winkle. Washington Irving gave his story a traditional sense of the old German folktales; he also used

Washington Irving, as a traditional writer, used many forms of romanticism in Rip Van Winkle. A key element in romanticism is dreams and imagination. This is very important in this story because the enlightened era believed in solely facts, not of what the mind could create as a dream. Rip’s imagination gets the best of him as he runs wild up the Catskill Mountains, he meets the strange man, and follows him to take a drink. He fits into the romanticism era because he had recalled the previous events before he fell asleep. For example Rip thinks, “Oh! That Flagon! That wicked Flagon!”

He used three different types of tones in Rip Van Winkle while incorporating the way he really felt about the instances he was writing about. Washington Irving used a romantic tone by telling us how beautiful the mountains were. This is the main tone Irving used in Rip Van Winkle. He then used a comical tone by using sarcastic phrased and depicting how mouthy Dame Van Winkle often was, but he also used a satirical tone. Lastly, Irving used a nostalgic tone by letting Rip realize that things were different and making Rip miss the things that were once