The narrator of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Diedrich Knickerbocker, adopts a gently mocking, tongue-in-cheek tone toward the characters in his tale. One of Knickerbocker’s primary targets is his hapless hero, Ichabod Crane, whom he ridicules for everything from his lanky body to his eating habits. After going into a detailed description of the dinner spread at the Van Tassel party, Knickerbocker states:
I want breath and time to discuss this banquet as it deserves, and am too eager to get on with my story. Happily, Ichabod Crane was not in so great a hurry as his historian, but did ample justice to every dainty.
Knickerbocker does not skimp on his description of the banquet—this passage follows a lengthy inventory of the many varieties of donuts, crullers, cakes, pies, and shortbreads on the Van Tassel table. As a result, the reader can only imagine how ravenous Ichabod must have been to do “ample justice” to the spread. Knickerbocker never insults Ichabod outright. Instead of labeling his leading man “gluttonous” or “greedy,” he lets readers draw their own conclusions about Ichabod’s abnormal fixation on food.
This aversion to telling readers what to think is not only a characteristic of Washington Irving’s narrator, Knickerbocker. It is also characteristic of Irving himself. In the story’s postscript, the storyteller provides the following nonsensical moral to “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow:”
There is no situation in life but has its advantages and pleasures—provided we will but take a joke […] therefore, he that runs races with goblin troopers is likely to have a rough riding of it. Ergo, for a country schoolmaster to be refused the hand of a Dutch heiress is a certain step to high preferment in the state.
These so-called lessons poke fun at the attempt to decipher an objective meaning from a story as whimsical and hyperbolic as “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” By closing with these unsatisfying morals, Irving raises questions about the purpose of storytelling. Do we tell tales for information or for enjoyment? Does a tale have to impart a moral message to be worthwhile?
The narrator of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Diedrich Knickerbocker, adopts a gently mocking, tongue-in-cheek tone toward the characters in his tale. One of Knickerbocker’s primary targets is his hapless hero, Ichabod Crane, whom he ridicules for everything from his lanky body to his eating habits. After going into a detailed description of the dinner spread at the Van Tassel party, Knickerbocker states:
I want breath and time to discuss this banquet as it deserves, and am too eager to get on with my story. Happily, Ichabod Crane was not in so great a hurry as his historian, but did ample justice to every dainty.
Knickerbocker does not skimp on his description of the banquet—this passage follows a lengthy inventory of the many varieties of donuts, crullers, cakes, pies, and shortbreads on the Van Tassel table. As a result, the reader can only imagine how ravenous Ichabod must have been to do “ample justice” to the spread. Knickerbocker never insults Ichabod outright. Instead of labeling his leading man “gluttonous” or “greedy,” he lets readers draw their own conclusions about Ichabod’s abnormal fixation on food.
This aversion to telling readers what to think is not only a characteristic of Washington Irving’s narrator, Knickerbocker. It is also characteristic of Irving himself. In the story’s postscript, the storyteller provides the following nonsensical moral to “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow:”
There is no situation in life but has its advantages and pleasures—provided we will but take a joke […] therefore, he that runs races with goblin troopers is likely to have a rough riding of it. Ergo, for a country schoolmaster to be refused the hand of a Dutch heiress is a certain step to high preferment in the state.
These so-called lessons poke fun at the attempt to decipher an objective meaning from a story as whimsical and hyperbolic as “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” By closing with these unsatisfying morals, Irving raises questions about the purpose of storytelling. Do we tell tales for information or for enjoyment? Does a tale have to impart a moral message to be worthwhile?
