Amercan Liturature
...the story it said that not even the dog would bark at him in the neighborhood. Rip was ready to attend to anybody’s business but his own; the farm could be hanging onto one bolt and he found it impossible to keep it on order. It was his farm that was the worst conditioned farm in the entire neighborhood. Dame Van Winkle had a tongue. She would always be yelling at Rip for everything and anything that he did. He was a very lazy man around his own house. His escape was to go into the woods. One day he traveled with his gun and dog, Wolf, they got lost in the woods and later met a shaggy long bearded man, which kind of looked like Rip. This stranger asked for help to carry a keg up the mountain where they met a party and drank from the flagon. Rip woke what he thought was the next morning. He went back to town and saw his daughter with a child and she told him that her mother died from a popped blood vessel in rage with Rip. Oddly enough he was happy that she was gone. Rip soon found out he was missing for twenty years, when to him felt only one night that he was gone. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote the story of Young Goodman Brown in 1835. Brown is a newlywed to a bride named Faith. This is a story of a man going to a journey that doesn’t realize it’s going to happen. Faith tells him to stay at home, but he refuses and leaves out into the woods. Goodman says he won’t go further out to the woods, but does every time. The woods are considered to be dangerous, a sinful thing, uncivilized, something that good people wouldn’t do. He breaks away from “Faith”, both wife and his own faith. In the woods meets a man resembling like himself but older, takes him to a meeting out in the woods. Goodman sees other people from the village at the gathering. Thinks it’s an initiation into manhood and notices the character resembles the devil. He recognizes his wife, Faith in the middle of the meeting. He yells out to her to look up into heaven and resist when all of a sudden a flash everything was back to normal and he wakes up. Goodman is not sure what happened, yet he thinks it’s true. He never looks at his wife or neighbors the same way; he is a changed man. Becomes cold and distant and says that he sees people being evil, looks down on himself. No one cared when he died he was nothing to no one. In addition to the stories I believe it is necessary to understand the characters in these two stories more. Starting off with Rip Van Winkle. Rip Van Winkle was the kind of man to help anyone in need of assistance, but did not help out in his own personal things like his wife or children. He is considered as a runaway. Must have been so drunk to compact 20 years into one night out, which is what he thinks. The dog smart enough to leave him, finds way back home. So many events have happened in twenty years that Rip has no idea what the towns’ people were talking to him about. He talked about the King, where twenty years later the colonies separated themselves from the British rules. They had set up a democracy under General Washington, which was the United States First President. To understand Young Goodman Brown he came from a background of Puritanism. His wife Faith, has a reason to have that name. Her gift to Brown isn't a gift of love or passion. Her gift to him is an awakening to the world around him. But he doesn’t understand the world around him. It was discussed in class that he was more of a corpse when he was alive. Goodman believed that everyone at the meeting in the woods were all damned to evil. He has too much Pride within himself that in the end no one cries when he dies, and no one writes anything of hope on his tombstone. Some information about the author Washington Irving from Rip Van Winkle, was that he was the first popular American writer. He was between the line of the American Writers and the Old World. Irving likes the romantic stuff and has a weird sense of humor. A big exaggerator in stories too. Reading Rip Van Winkle the exaggeration took place where he disappears 20 years in the woods and came back thinking it was only one night. How can someone compact such a long time into one night, even if he partied all day- every day, there should have been some sort of soberness in it, right? Information on Nathaniel Hawthorne was that he was a religious man. Hawthorne's writings dealt with the religious beliefs he held as well as those he questioned. Young Goodman Brown was written in 1854 as Hawthorne struggled inwardly with the religious beliefs of h...