Rip Van Winkle--Washington Irving

There's probably no character in American Literature, excluding those of Mark Twain, better known than Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle, yet he's also singularly misunderstood. Show most people an image of a hillbilly-ish character, sporting a long beard, asleep under a tree, and many of them, perhaps most of them will identify him as Rip, but what do they know about Irving's story.
To my mind, the most interesting thing about this short story is not that Rip Van Winkle wandered off into the mountains, met spirits of some sort, slept for twenty years, and then came home. That's the surface level of the tale, but it's not what made Irving's literary reputation. Unfortunately, in our visual culture, the original tale of Rip has been drowned in its own plot. After all, how do you portray his story on screen without simply telling the tale as it is related.
The problem with these portrayals is that they miss out on the vagaries of narration. Let me explain. First of all, who is the narrator of Rip Van Winkle? How does the story move from the events that actually happened to our own minds? In a film version, we perceive directly. We see it happen. There's not much room for ambiguity in viewer's mind. Yes, sometimes film-makers will play with reality and withhold information from us, but largely we see what is.
Not so in Washington Irving's story. Notice that the story is not a typical first- or third-person account. Instead, we get the events filtered between the time they happened and the time we read them. The story is told to us by a narrator, presumably Washington Irving, but since the narrator is clearly making some of this up--for example, there is no Diedrich Knickerbocker--I would suggest that the story comes by way of Washington Irving the writer and then his literary creation, "Washington Irving" the narrator, who in turn claims to have taken information from one Knickerbocker. Knickerbocker apparently gathered his information from the townspeople who knew Rip (although DK claims to have met Rip as well). The townspeople gathered their information from Rip who experienced the events firsthand. Thus our narration comes to us in this sort of progression:

1. Events experienced by
2. Rip, who told them to the
3. Townspeople, who shared with
4. Knickerbocker, who wrote and was read by
5. "Washington Irving," who is a literary creation of
6. Washington Irving, who wrote a account for
7. You.

That's a bit complicated, but there's more. We have to wonder whether Rip's tale is true. Why should we doubt him? Most obviously, his story is rather incredible. How could it be true. But there are further reasons to doubt its veracity, most notably its constant insistence on its own truthfulness.
Start with the epigraph, by William Cartwright, especially the third line: "Truth is a thing that ever I will keep." Then plunge into the first section, a sort of editorial addition by "Washington Irving," which insists on the "scrupulous accuracy" of Knickerbocker's accounts. Reading the second paragraph of the story, one encounters three affirmations of Knickerbocker's accuracy in a single sentence. Methinks the narrator doth protest too much.
At the close of the story, "Irving" adds an editorial note supposedly from Knickerbocker. There again, we are greeted with a series of insistences on the truthfulness of the whole affair. After all, Knickerbocker points out, he heard it straight from Rip Van Winkle's mouth.
If that's not enough to make us doubt the truth of the story, read the last paragraph before that concluding note: "He [Rip] used to tell his story to every stranger that arrived at Mr. Doolittle's hotel. He was observed, at first, to vary on some points every time he told it, which was, doubtless, owing to his having so recently awaked. It at last settled down precisely to the tale I have related." Clearly, if Irving was not trying to infuse doubt about the trustworthy nature of this story, he included a lot of very odd and unproductive extras.
If Rip did make the story up, what was he doing during this twenty year period? Let me suggest the following:

Wandering in the mountains one day, Rip grumbled about his life. Tired of his
wife and her demands, he determined not to head home. Instead he got far enough
away from his village to live as he liked, undiscovered, and passed those two
decades. Only as he started to move into old age did Rip begin to think of home
again. Perhaps driven by a desire to see his children, perhaps because of guilt,
perhaps because he had no where else to go, Rip returned to the village.
However, he knew that he couldn't simply stroll into town and laugh off a
twenty-year absence. He would instead tell a tale sure to excite wonder and
(hopefully) belief in his neighbors. He told that tale, perhaps eventually
starting to believe it himself.

What is uniquely Christian about this story? Nothing really, but there are lessons for the Christian reader to draw, most notably about the unreliable nature of the human heart and the deceptions and self-deceptions that progress out of that heart. The mind will believe many things that it should not believe, often convincing itself to believe what one can scarcely imagine to be true. A skeptic might say that this is what the Christian does in believing the account of the Bible. Obviously since some people believe the Bible and some believe the Book of Mormon and some believe the Koran and some believe other things, some of these people, these people walking in absolute certainty, must be mistaken. How do we know that it is not us? How do we know that we are not Rip Van Winkle's dupes?
I don't get the sense that Washington Irving was a mean-spirited writer dedicated to humiliating and lampooning the credulous people who believed Rip Van Winkle's story. However, I do read him as somebody who wanted us to question the veracity of our sources and the trustworthiness of our own minds at every opportunity. If what we follow is indeed the Truth, we can do much worse than to heed Irving's admonitions.