Ron Rash's Into the Gorge - Essay Example

Ron Rash's Into the GorgeIt is usually hard to select the best of Rash’s stories they are wide ranging with a deep blend of Appalachian literature, in this case “Into Gorge”. The story is jointed, dovetailed, crafted in quite beautiful and striking ways. The author depicts people in a poignant and funny way showing people on the run betting their all attempting to get through lonely nights. The story shows an elegy of family history of a vanishing way of life. Rush’s story “Into George” is no less heartbreaking just as the other stories, as he portrays a man who is driven away from his family due to desperation.

In addition the story captures the stark violence, eerie beauty and rugged character of Appalachia. Appalachian culture and portrayal is an accurate one, because the story takes an interesting turn just at it commences when the main character is depicted as supplement to the character highlighted in the opening paragraph (Rash p.5). It is actually Jesse’s aunt who is described other than Jesse himself. This makes the reader to be attached to the aunt only to be torn away from her just as soon.

In Into the Gorge, a place has been used to determine a family’s history. Jesse’s great-aunt had been born on this particular land and resided in it for eight decades and therefore knew it with the same recognition as she knew her husband and children. Rush writes “And could tell you to the week when the first dogwood blossom would brighten the ridge . . . Then her mind had wandered into a place she could not follow, taking with it all the people she knew, their names and connections” (19).

Jesse actual sense is able to recall all of this and more. Jesses was just a young boy when her aunt wandered off to die alone in the gorge. Since then, years have rolled past and now Jesse is aged and not expecting to be caught by the park ranger while harvesting his long dead father’s crop of ginseng. Jesse says “Can’t you forget this….It ain’t like I was growing marijuana. There’s plenty that do in this park” (20-21).The ranger however goes ahead and sneers at his captive and Jesse fights back, as fate and family history take over in this scenario.

Retribution needs to be handed down by the law enforcement agents, who are described as being blandly dispassionate as they inescapable. In some instances, their energy is usually misdirected like the park ranger who denied accessibility to the ginseng plants (20-21). Graham's encounter with her ghost in the "Night fell fast now."(24) is evident of what many of us are claim when faced with experiences that we can not easily comprehend. For instance memories burn deep images in the mind and a soldier who returns home from war recalling a man that he killed and whose body he had then knelt by while performing a ritual that he had required as much as the dead man had.

Elsewhere, a century earlier during another war, a young woman while waiting for her husband to return, is astonished by the appearance of enemy in the form of an older man she had met while she was a child (138-142). All these are portrays encounters with ghosts, although personal anarchy is what sustains her vigil.Rash depicts blinkered characters who are actually doing wrong things but in arguably for the right reasons, since they are driven by away from their families due to desperation and superstition.

In the end, they wait stoically for a fate they have been tired of running from. This is actually the same contemporary Appalachia that we are living, where people are driven away from their families and law enforcement officials a number of them operate outside their code of conduct. Like many other stories the story ends before any real solution has obtained.Works CitedRash, Ron. "Into the Gorge." Academic Journal 44.4 (2008): 628.