As you all may know by now, I love October. It’s an amazing month to me because the temperature goes down, the leaves change from green to golds and reds, and Halloween is right around the corner. Halloween is, by far, my favorite holiday. Christmas and Thanksgiving are awesome in their own ways, but they aren’t on the same level as Halloween. You can dress up as anything you’d like, so if there’s a dream you never got to fulfill, for just one night out of the year, you can live out that fantasy. Kids get to run around and go to strangers’ homes to get free candy, and adults, ranging from 20 to 40, are most likely at a friend’s house or a club drinking the night away. October and Halloween are a time for horror and things that go bump in the night, which brings me to the topic of this post: “The Adventure of the German Student” by Washington Irving. I thought it would be more appropriate to review a ghost/scary story for this spook-takular part of the year.
“The Adventure of the German Student” is about a young man named Gottfried Wolfgang who is likely suffering from depression, and his friends send him to Paris during the French Revolution. Not really the greatest time or place for a person who has a “melancholy temperament” to be, but kudos to his friends for trying to help. To be quite honest, the story really isn’t scary. In fact, it doesn’t even border on creepy – the baby version of scary. It’s more like a funny ghost story. I don’t know what was Irving’s purpose in creating the story, but I still enjoyed it in some way. While I didn’t like how Wolfgang’s story ended, I like the actual end of the work. It kind of left me with the questions: Who the man was talking to? and Who was the narrator of the story?
I think Irving’s “The Adventure of the German Student” is a perfect story to tell to kids because it’s not meant to be scary in my opinion. It’s given a dark history and backdrop, but when you actually get into the story, the atmosphere lightens up. Wolfgang has become so melancholic that he’s become fascinated by this strange beauty that haunts his dreams, and suddenly he meets her. Absolutely nothing about would scare a child unless they were still in that stage where they think girls or guys are icky. But besides that, it’s perfect to read to a group of kids around a little fire while they roast marshmallows and make smores. As an official rating, I give the story five jack o’lanterns out of five jack o’lanterns for children, and one rotten jack o’lantern out of five jack o’lanterns for anyone else who decides to read it. I do encourage you to read it though to find out what happens to Gottfried and his mysterious beauty!
