“Rip Van Winkle” is a story about the cultural demand for creating origins in the past for the newly-built America and its European immigrants’ new identities as Americans. Despite his absence during the revolution, Rip becomes the “chronicle” of the past to the “rising” generation, and his encounter with strangers in the Catskill Mountains is remembered as a meeting with ancestor figures. The multiple narrators, the allusions to European texts, the native American legends, and the claims of veracity in the story show that the story is framed in structure and in theme by irony and self-consciousness. The ambivalence of the narrative constructed through the multiple narrators’ claims of veracity and satire of it can be a narcissistic division of idealization and aggression. As Grant Stirling points out, the characteristics of narcissism resonate with the self-reflexive aspect of metafiction. In this sense, this work can be Irving’s meta-narrative with a generic challenge to historical reconstruction and critique of the narratives of the American Revolution driven by cultural and political needs to establish certainty and origin.
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