Rip Van Winkle is the story of a henpecked man who travels one day into the Catskill Mountains where he happens upon a stranger struggling to lug a barrel of liquor up the slope. Assisting, Rip happens upon an amphitheater of strange men playing billiards. He drinks from the barrel and falls asleep, then wakes up many decades later after the end of the American Revolutionary War. The story is a parable for isolation from war and for forgetting the painful memories it causes.
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