The short story "Rip Van Winkle" is the story of a man who went up into the mountains and after a long series of strange events went to sleep. He woke up twenty years later. He went from being used to what the world was like before the United States Revolutionary War to how things changed after the war. When he returned from the mountain he found that his wife and friends were no longer there. His children were grown and living in this new world he had stumbled upon. He found that changes had been made in clothing and the way people behaved; the buildings that had once been in the city were now gone or changed, and there was a government he had no idea about. In this story the author used the differences between the pre-revolutionary war and the post-revolutionary war to show the changes in life and the maintenance of some traditions. This is a recurring theme in this story. During the Revolutionary War, the people who once lived in the small town were now gone and new adults were living there. For example, his wife and also his close friend, Nicholas Vedder, had died while he was sleeping in the woods. Rip Van Winkle was happy when he found out his wife was dead because he didn't have to deal with fear towards his wife (Catalano). Yet he was shocked when he learned that his partner had died and that other friends had left the city. Rip Van Winkle didn't know who he would gossip with at the local inn. He considered himself alone in the world because there was no one he knew in town at that moment. The Revolutionary War controlled his friend's life because Brom Dutcher went to fight for the army and another drowned in a fight. Some people who die have helped complete the cycle of life and have changed... middle of paper... the cycle and changes of life as time passes. Works Cited Page Catalano, Susan M. “Henbecked to Heroism: Placing Rip Van Winkle and Francis Macomber in the American Renegade Tradition.” Hemingway review. Hemingway Society, 1998. Web. 18 December 2013. < http://web.ebscohost.com/lrc/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=8ed02e85- 26cb-494e-a2b0-a1d63bc8f010%40sessionmgr110&vid=4&hid=125>.Ferguson, Robert A. “Rip Van Winkle and the Generation Gap in American Culture.” JSTOR. Early American Literature, 2005. Web. December 18, 2013. .Wyman, Sarah. “Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle: A Dangerous Critique of a New Nation.” ANQ. Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2010. Web. 18 December. 2013. .