The Ascent Rom Rash Analysis

In Rom Rash’s “The Ascent” a fifth-grader named Jared goes on an adventure through the Great Smoky Mountains. While exploring, he finds a plane that has recently crashed and has a dead couple onboard the plane. Jared also does not have a great home life with his parents who use drugs. Rash is able to show how Jared and his parents want to escape reality through their daily life decisions. More specifically, Rash is using Jared’s imagination and his parent’s use of drugs to give the story a theme of escaping a harsh reality. Jared’s parents consistently use drugs to escape their home life. They are constantly seen as high, or when they are not high, they are very sick and realize the situation they are in. The family’s home is described by

The first-time Jared’s parents are associated with drugs is when the author says, “The small red glass pipe was on the coffee table, an empty baggie beside it” (Rash 281). As they were associated with drugs, it becomes clear that they often took drugs to forget about the life that they were living. The parents were tied into the story’s theme of escaping reality by using drugs to cope with the things that were wrong in their life. When it comes to Jared, he prefers to escape reality by imagining many things. Throughout the entire story, the word “pretending” is often used whenever Jared is doing something. Jared would pretend he was with Lyndee so that he could feel like she liked him even though his “clothes smelled”. His imagination that he constantly uses in the woods helps him to cope with how is home life and his parents are. Towards the end of the story, Jared and his parents escape reality the ultimate way possible. After Jared brings his dad the watch, his parents immediately set out to get more drugs. While they are gone, Jared makes his way back to the plane while there is a blizzard outside. Jared’s parents escape their reality by overdosing on drugs and Jared escapes his reality by dying of hypothermia while sitting in the plane. Evidence of this is shown when the narrator says, “…he looked down, waiting for the clouds to clear so he might look for the blue pickup, making its way through the snow, toward the place they were all headed” (Rash 287). As Jared is “looking down”, this is representing that he is on his was to Death and so are his parents. Although Jared has his imagination and his parents have their drugs to escape reality, only death was the only way for them to truly escape their harsh