Tales From Varying Cultures

Cross-Cultural; Study Plot The plot of the fairytale of Rip Van Winkle is such that it moves from the current time in the tale, then skips twenty years ahead all crumped up in one night and back to the present time. RIP goes out into the woods and gets attracted by the spirits into their cave in the rocks where he gets drunk and passes out for the whole night.

When he wakes up he finds himself not in the cave of the bearded and strange men but in the woods, in his hand a rusted gun and his Wolf dog missing, his clothes are tattered and his beards overgrown. When he returns to the village, things have changed, many buildings he knew yesterday were strange and the people in the village are all strange.

It was upon enquiry and interacting with the people that he realizes he had actually been away for twenty years and he was presumed lost and dead. The plot of the fairytale transcends time and skips twenty years ahead to bring the social, economic, and most important the political changes that took place in that span of time, with the U.S.A. now being independent and no longer under the queen.

The plot of the Germany Folktale is quite similar to the American one since Peter Klaus disappears while following his goat into the crevice of the wall within which he used to hold his flock after grazing them in the wilderness. He meanders in the strange world with strange people for a day and falls asleep only to wake up in the enclosed green space.

When he ventures back to the village, he has beards that are longer than usual and he realizes that he had been away for twenty years. Character The main character in the fairy with American rots is Rip Van Winkle and I known to be a likable character such that he found favor with al women in the village. Rip loved to attend to other people's affairs before his own.

Despite being such generous, he is depicted as one who is not keen to ensure his family is taken care of well as his farm is well attended to, he seemed to be keen on doing the work that the village women gave him and not his own work. He is depicted as a generally lazy person who would rather starve on a penny than work for a pound. The main character in the German folktale is a herdsman and not a hunter as is in the American folktale.

Unlike Rip who is depicted as lazy and only loves hunting squirrels, Peter is depicted as a person who loved to take care of his goats and indeed never got into the crevice on the wall for leisure but to look for his goat that kept disappearing, unlike Rip who followed the strange man into the cave as a result of loitering. Setting The setting of the fairytale with the roots in American society is in a village at the foot of Kaatskill Mountains.

The setting however changes to an isolated and strange place that looks like an amphitheater where Rip was led by the stranger he met in the woods. The new setting is filled with strange people and new objects of wonder, none like the ones Rip is used to in his daily life at home. This introduction of a new world with strange people, strange activities and strange objects changes the setting of the story from the real world to the surreal setting.

A world where as Rip observed, the people in there seemed to be amusing themselves but wore the gravest of the faces. This though was the surreal setting and the setting goes back to the real world twenty years after Rip gets into the woods. The German folktale has quite a similar setting of the village, the woods and the surreal world where Peter disappears and time shift changes in that surreal world and comes back to his senses twenty years after he slips into the surreal world.

Both stories present an old world, a surreal world of the fairytale and finally the new world. This is one similarity.