Rip Van Winkle's Odyssey

Extract

The wise Ulysses was more indebted to his sleeping than his waking moments for his most subtle achievements, and seldom undertook any great exploit without first soundly sleeping upon it…

James Joyce was the first reader of Washington Irving's famous tale of Rip Van Winkle to have noticed that Rip is ‘a lazy Odysseus’, as Andrew Burstein has more recently described him. Rip leaves home for twenty years, just as Odysseus did; however, unlike Odysseus, Rip spends this time not heroically fighting and adventuring but sleeping away his mature years. When he finally returns home, then, it is no surprise that the dog in front of his house ‘has forgotten' him, unlike Odysseus’ dog, who greets his master with a tail-wag of recognition. Irving creates in Rip Van Winkle an ironic and humorous embodiment of an Odysseus/Ulysses who, as quoted above, was ‘more indebted to his sleeping than his waking moments for his most subtle achievements’.