Rita Hayworth And The Shawshank Redemption Essay

In Stephen King 's "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," a man known as Red tells the story of Andy Dufresne. The authorities arrested Andy for a crime he did not commit and subsequently, he ended up in the Shawshank penitentiary with Red. Red, an astute prisoner, described how prison life could take away all hope of surviving on the outside, but for some reason, it did not take Andy 's hope. With hopefulness being an outlandish trait for a prisoner, it was no wonder that Red was always pondering as to how Andy could stay hopeful for so many years. His seemingly endless pondering would cease when Andy broke out of jail in a hole he had dug through the wall. Eventually, Red got out on parole, and it was the hope that Andy brought to

Under this circumstance, most people would jump aggressively on a chance for freedom, but Andy wasn 't sure the reward was there. Thus, being sensible, he hesitated. As the story progressed, Andy was always sensible towards risk and reward. Unlike his sensibility, his level of hope did not always remain static, as is evident when the warden notes that Andy "‘used to walk around [the] exercise yard as if it was a living room and [Andy was at] one of those cocktail parties…but [he doesn 't] walk around that way anymore '" (71). The absence of spring in Andy 's step presented that he was losing hope; however, it was clear that his hope had rebounded when he told Red his dream. Andy 's character in Stephen King 's "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" proved that if there 's a will there 's a way. Also, Andy himself had changed in the story, but discreetly. Andy, who may have been innocent but was by no means an angel, walked into Shawshank as naked as a newborn. When he escaped, he left Shawshank out of a woman, his pin-up girl, and crawled through 500 yards of muck to freedom. He was "reborn" as a free man. Put this all together, and the theme portrayed by Andy Dufresne is that hope, more