The short stories included in the book Burning Bright by Ron Rash all captured the concepts of promise, suffering, loneliness, and the intricacy of living near the Appalachian mountains. Although the historical eras/regions of the stories range from the great depression/civil war to modern times, all the books have deciding factors that link them all in some way. For example, Ascent was linked to Burning bright because they had similar themes which were, loneliness leading to people making morbid choices and the fear of being lonely causing people to make irrational decisions. In addition, both stories explained how finding safe havens were common when one is lonely. In this case, Jared, the main character in Ascent, used the crash site as his haven …show more content…
The idea that pain comes when a bond between a child and parent is corrupted appears numerous amounts of times in the book. Jared’s parents weren't exactly ideal parents seeing as they neglected him many times which caused Jared to not want to be at home most of the time. Jared’s parent's neglect is what caused his very tragic but peaceful death. Another example of this appears in Back of beyond when the main character’s nephew, Danny, allowed himself to get addicted to meth and ruin the relationship he had previously built with his parents. This of course brought excessive amounts of pain to both Danny and his parents because the bonds they had were now severed. Methamphetamine addiction is also used to connect the stories of Back of Beyond and Ascent to show how addiction played a huge part in how each character turned out. Back of beyond had the perspective of a child being addicted to meth and how that affected the people around him, while Ascent had the perspective of parents being addicted and how that impacted their child's