This actor is punished

This is a work worth discussing, and it is also a work that expresses the deepest human nature.

Assumptions about the good and evil of human nature have been the subject of literature for a long time.

After entering the 20th century, the devastating disasters brought about by the two world wars, the man-made destruction of the living environment and the raging diseases made the concepts of rationality, belief, and morality carefully constructed by people for thousands of years disappear in smoke.

People began to have doubts about human nature, and felt anxious and pessimistic about the future fate and prospects.

Against such a background, most of the modernist writers who have turned to expressing the subjective spiritual world of people have fallen into the quagmire of nihility and pessimism. Images of "evil human nature" emerge in endlessly in literary works, making people feel that the meaning and value of human existence are facing serious challenges.

Andy's redemption journey is full of despair and extremely heavy. During this process, what makes him not feel wronged when he is wronged, does not become violent when he is suppressed, and does not feel despair when he is faced with adversity. Instead, he always maintains a calm state of mind and a tenacious fighting spirit?
The answer is very clear, that is Andy's rationality, which is different from ordinary people. Reason enables him to strike a balance between gains and losses freely, so that he strips hatred from himself, surpasses himself, and finally reaches the shore of freedom.

The work hardly focuses on how Andy digs a hole with difficulty, tenacity, and wisdom, but shows him as a representative of a person with capital letters.

Andy did not lose his kind humanity from the beginning to the end in the magic city that cruelly devoured the body and soul, and stubbornly completed the persistence of humanity, that is, the tenacious self-awareness and affirmation of one's emotions, rights, and values ​​as a person.

Reason makes him never accept his fate, makes him believe that human nature is indestructible, makes him always have hope and imagination for freedom, and makes him make unremitting efforts for self-salvation and the realization of real freedom of the human body.

The Shawshank described by Stephen King is a place of dehumanization. The long-term spiritual torture in the prison has institutionalized every prisoner.Reid's words are thought-provoking: "When you first went to prison, you hated the high wall around you. Slowly, you got used to living in it, and finally you found that you had to rely on it to survive."

The story of the pigeon and the prisoner Brooke is horrifying to hear.A prisoner raised a pigeon when he was in prison, and he always took the pigeon to a corner of the playground when he was released. Eight years later, he was released after serving his sentence. The day before he was released from prison, he released the pigeon that he had raised for eight years, and the pigeon flew away beautifully.

However, a week later, Andy saw the pigeon again in that corner of the sports field. The pigeon was lying there like dung. The pigeon had been institutionalized by prison life, and the corner of the sports field became its entire living space.

And prisoner Brooke, who spent decades in Shawshank Prison, has become his whole world.

In Brooke's eyes, the world outside the wall was really terrible. He didn't know how to live after he got out. When he was released on parole, he held the parole papers in one hand and the bus ticket in the other, crying while walking, and died in a home for the poor within a year.

Everyone who came out of Shawshank became a walking dead, let alone keep their humanity.

The title of The Shawshank Redemption is also symbolic.

Shawshank symbolizes darkness and evil, while the word redemption, which originated in the Old Testament Isaiah, symbolizes the practice of Christian thought.

It is worth thinking about that the characters in the novel did not take "religion as the foundation of social life" like the early American immigrants, and of course they did not carry out any religious practice.

The protagonist Andy did not wait for God's redemption for him, but relied on his persistence to good humanity, saved himself and others, won freedom, and achieved rebirth.In fact, with the lack of belief in Western society in the 20th century, humanism replaced divineism, and this term seems to have become less popular.

Many American writers have long noticed that "material money is a corrosive agent, and industrial technology is a source of dehumanization."

The redemption achieved by Stephen King's "alternative" character Andy in Shawshank Prison for decades with painstaking efforts and bleak management is by no means the redemption in the general Christian doctrine. It seems that the redemption here is more appropriate to add quotation marks, to express more connotations, and to see the author's deep concern and thinking about many problems in the current society and modern human nature.

The novel "The Shawshank Redemption" interprets the true meaning of hope and freedom. It can be said that if Andy in the story gives up hope, he will not be free. It is not difficult to see from the plot of the novel that hope guides actions, not only the protagonist Andy, but even Reid in the story found light and hope through Andy's gift, and finally gained freedom through hope.

Although hope and freedom are words with different meanings, they have a causal relationship in the novel."Hope" is the most sincere fantasy, hope, expectation, desire to achieve a certain purpose or a certain situation.

Because Andy has hope, he can make a series of redemptions to save himself.

Freedom in the story is the fulfillment of hope.

In "The Shawshank Redemption", it is difficult to draw a clear line between good and evil. The warden and prison guards who were symbols of justice turned out to be the incarnations of evil, and the prisoners who committed crimes finally proved to be representatives of justice.

Symbols of good and evil return to the real world from the ancient Middle Ages.

In the closed prison, the prisoners pass the time with fighting and perverted behavior. The guilty prisoners accept the fact of being imprisoned, but the innocent Andy can only be freed through extreme methods.

All kinds of characters are vividly interpreting life in the real world.

Essentially, The Shawshank Redemption is a paean to American egocentrism.

However, it eschews the traditional model of individual heroism.

The original author did not simply portray the character of Andy as a lonely British-Victorian character, and did not observe the world from Andy's perspective.

Instead, it brings readers into Andy's world and the long prison life from the perspective of the second protagonist Reid.

Reid's confession actually represents the views and attitudes of most prisoners in the prison towards real life. The author cleverly uses this pair of invisible hands to bring Andy's emotions and readers' emotions closer step by step, so that readers can feel closely connected with Andy's fate at a close distance, and naturally indulge their emotions as the protagonist encounters.

Of course, Andy himself is not a hero or an embodiment of redemption, he is just a very ordinary person.Of course, this hero still lacks something, he is not a person of high morality, otherwise, he would not steal the warden's ill-gotten gains, nor would he escape from prison.If he was perfect, Andy would not be so distinctive, and would not be suitable for attracting the messenger's attention.So, Andy is an alternative old American hero.