Crime And Punishment By Ron Rash Analysis

Ron Rash, born September 25, 1953, is an internationally acclaimed short story writer, novelist, and poet. Rash was born in a small mill town in South Carolina, and was raised in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in western North Carolina. Rash spent most of his youth on a farm near Boone, where he grew up listening to Appalachian folktales and reading voraciously; his time there later gave him inspiration for the setting of many of his stories. Rash’s family greatly influenced him as a reader and a writer. His father, a professor, and mother, a schoolteacher, encouraged him to read as much as possible, and his illiterate paternal grandfather inspired him to always be imaginative. In high school, Rash decided that he wanted to become a writer after reading Crime and Punishment, a book he claims ‘changed his life.’ Rash went on to get his Bachelor’s degree in English at Gardner Webb University and his Master’s degree at Clemson University. After graduate school,

He harvests ginseng that his father had planted about fifty years ago. Even though Jesse is aware that the land the ginseng is planted on is owned by park services, he argues that the property should belong to him. One day while harvesting ginseng, a park ranger confronts him about his use of the land, which leads Jesse into a fit of rage. He pushes the park ranger into an old, abandoned well, and almost immediately becomes the subject of a manhunt by authorities. At the end of the story, Jesse is hiding in the woods, awaiting his fate. Readers are able to sympathize with Jesse, because of in his mind, he was only protecting what he believed was his property. Rash’s forgiving portrayal of Jesse is best described in a New York Times review of Burning Bright, “The narrator winds up not disobeying federal laws so much as failing to see why they outweigh his own ideas of respect and rectitude”