Isolation In The Ascent Theme

Isolated Imagination
Loneliness is usually a common and unharmful feeling, however, when a child is isolated his whole life, loneliness can have a much more morbid effect. This theme, prevalent throughout Ron Rash’s short story, The Ascent, is demonstrated through Jared, a young boy who is neglected by his parents. In the story, Jared escapes his miserable home life to a plane wreck he discovers while roaming the wilderness. Through the use of detached imagery and the emotional characterization of Jared as self-isolating, Rash argues that escaping too far from reality can be very harmful to the stability of one’s emotional being.
The isolated and desolate imagery throughout effectively conveys Jared’s extreme detachment from his surroundings.

In the beginning of The Ascent, Jared is seen as an imaginative and innocent child, albeit a little lonely. However, the tone dramatically shifts when Jared discovers the plane wreck and “sit[s] in the back seat [for] two hours, though [to him] it seem[s] only a few minutes” (Rash 281). By finding comfort with dead people, it is clear that Jared is emotionally disturbed. He isolates himself from others by depending on his imagination to make up for his lack of company. This is further exemplified when Jared watches his parents “pas[s] the pipe back and forth… want[ing] to go back to the plane” (Rash 284). Rather than stay with his drug-abusive and neglectful parents during Christmas time, Jared desires to escape to the place where he can be alone with just his imagination. According to Robert Stanley Martin’s review of the short story, “[t]he plane becomes to [Jared] what the drugs are to his parents: a place to escape that he never wants to leave, and which he always longs to return.” The plane and drugs in the short story are extreme examples of common forms of escapism used by humans every day. People love to take a mental and emotional break from reality in the form of vacations and hobbies. However, when these examples of escapism are vastly more important to individuals that actuality, they can become “numb inside the vehicles of their escape” (Martin). This is very detrimental to one’s emotional stability as an individual will lose his perception of the real world. At the end of The Ascent, when visiting the plane for the final time, Jared has escaped so far from reality that he imagines the plane “ha[s] taken off” (Rash 287). He stays in the plane for so long that “after a while he began to shiver but after a longer while he was no longer cold”, demonstrating his eventual death from hypothermia (Rash 287).