We can't help feeling sorry for poor Rip Van Winkle when
he returns to his "home" after his twenty year nap. He is quite clearly bewildered as he
returns to his village to find so many differences and changes from what he had known.
However, perhaps the quote that most clearly reveals his astonishment is when he asks if
anyone knows a Rip Van Winkle, and he is directed towards a figure who we know to be his
son grown up:
Rip looked, and beheld a precise counterpart of
himself as he went up the mountain: apparently as lazy, and certainly as ragged. The
poor fellow was now completely confounded. He doubted his own identity, and whether he
was himself or another man. In the midst of his bewilderment, the man in the cocked hat
demanded who he was, and what was his
name?
Seeing such a "double"
of himself completely silences Rip Van Winkle, and with this and all of the changes, he
is not able to answer the question put to him, feeling unable to give his name or his
identity.
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