Rita Hayworth And The Shawshank Redemption, Stephen King, (1982), ending.

Then came 23 April, a day I'll not forget even if I live another fifty-eight years. It was a balmy Saturday afternoon, and I was walking up what a little boy fishing from a bridge told me was called The Old Smith Road. I had taken a lunch in a brown FoodWay bag, and had eaten it sitting on a rock by the road. When I was done I carefully buried my leavings, as my dad had taught me before he died, when I was a sprat no older than the fisherman who had named the road for me.

Around two o'clock I came to a big field on my left. There was a stone wall at the far end of it, running roughly northwest I walked back to it, squelching over the wet ground, and began to walk the wall. A squirrel scolded me from an oak tree. Three-quarters of the way to the end, I saw the rock. No mistake. Black glass and as smooth as silk. A rock with no earthly business in a Maine hayfield. For a long time I just looked at it, feeling that I might cry, for whatever reason. The squirrel had followed me, and it was still chattering away. My heart was beating madly.

When I felt I had myself under control, I went to the rock, squatted beside it – the joints in my knees went off like a double-barrelled shotgun - and let my hand touch it. It was real. I didn't pick it up because I thought there would be anything under it; I could just as easily have walked away without finding what was beneath. I certainly had no plans to take it away with me, because I didn't fed it was mine to take - I had a feeling that taking that rock from the field would have been the worst kind of theft. No, I only picked it up to feel it better, to get the heft of the thing, and, I suppose, to prove its reality by feeling its satiny texture against my skin.

I had to look at what was underneath for a long time. My eyes saw it, but it took a while for my mind to catch up. It was an envelope, carefully wrapped in a plastic bag to keep away the damp. My name was written across the front in Andy's clear script. I took the envelope and left the rock where Andy had left it, and Andy's friend before him.

Dear Red, If you're reading this, then you're out. One way or another, you're out. And If you've followed along this far, you might be willing to come a little further. I think you remember the name of the town, don't you? I could use a good man to help me get my project on wheels. Meantime, have a drink on me - and do think it over. I will be keeping an eye out for you. Remember that hope is a good thing, Red, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. I will be hoping that this letter finds you, and finds you well. Your friend, Peter Stevens

I didn't read that letter in the field. A kind of terror had come over me, a need to get away from there before I was seen. To make what may be an appropriate pun, I was in terror of being apprehended. I went back to my room and read it there, with the smell of old men's dinners drifting up the stairwell to me - Beefaroni, Ricearoni, Noodleroni. You can bet that whatever the old folks of America, the ones on fixed incomes, are eating tonight, it almost certainly ends in roni.

I opened the envelope and read the letter and then I put my head in my arms and cried. With the letter there were twenty new fifty-dollar bills. And here I am in the Brewster Hotel, technically a fugitive from justice again – parole violation is my crime. No one's going to throw up any roadblocks to catch a criminal wanted on that charge, I guess - wondering what I should do now. I have this manuscript I have a small piece of luggage about the size of a doctor's bag that holds everything I own. I have 1 nineteen fifties, four tens, a five, three ones, and assorted change. I broke one of the fifties to buy this tablet of paper and a deck of smokes. Wondering what I should do. But there's really no question. It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living or get busy dying.

First I'm going to put this manuscript back in my bag. Then I'm going to buckle it up, grab my coat, go downstairs, and check out of this fleabag. Then I'm going to walk uptown to a bar and put that five dollar bill down in front of the bartender and ask him to bring me two straight shots of Jack Daniels - one for me and one for Andy Dufresne. Other than a beer or two, they'll be the first drinks I've taken as a free man since 1938. Then I am going to tip the bartender a dollar and thank him kindly. I will leave the bar and walk up Spring Street to the Greyhound terminal there and buy a bus ticket to El Paso by way of New York City. When I get to El Paso, I'm going to buy a ticket to McNary. And when I get to McNary, I guess I'll have a chance to find out if an old crook like me can find a way to float across the border and into Mexico.

Sure I remember the name. Zihuatanejo. A name like that is just too pretty to forget. I find I am excited, so excited I can hardly hold the pencil in my trembling hand. I think it is the excitement that only a free man can feel, a free man starting a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain.

I hope Andy is down there. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.

Vocabulary

Balmy: Mild and pleasant (weather).

FoodWay: By extension, from airway, the alimentary canal. Cross-disciplinary approach to food and nutrition. Grocers-Retail Company. Foodway Supermarket is a Grocers-Retail company in the US.

Sprat: a young or small person (A small marine food fish of northeast Atlantic waters that is eaten fresh or smoked and is often canned in oil as a sardine).

Squelching: making a sucking sound made by movement in a thick, sticky substance eg mud.

Maine hayfield: A field where grass for hay has been cut in the state of Maine (in the New England region of the northeastern United States, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the east and south and the Canadian province of Quebec to the northwest).

Chatter: To utter a rapid series of short, inarticulate, speechlike sounds.

Heft: weight; heaviness; significance; importance.

Pun: A play on words, sometimes on different senses of the same word and sometimes on the similar sense or sound of different words.

Roni: pepperoni sausage, as for pizza or noddle.

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Parole: Early release of a prisoner who is then subject to continued monitoring as well as compliance with certain terms and conditions for a specified period (famous in Les Miserables).

Fleabag: a cheap or dirty hotel.

Jack Daniels: sour mash Tennessee whiskey that is the highest selling American whiskey in the world.

Shawshank Redemption, plot summary

Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption is a novella by Stephen King, from his collection Different Seasons (1982), subtitled Hope Springs Eternal. The novella's plotline is heavily based on God Sees the Truth, But Waits by Leo Tolstoy (1872). The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas, 1844) Versus The Shawshank Redemption: Edmond and Andy each seek revenge for the wrongful imprisonment they suffer, each struggle with their faith, and each escape from prison: Andy escaped by tunnelling through his cell wall, while Edmond and Priest worked together to tunnel under their cell floors.

Red, the narrator, recounts how he planned and carried out his wife’s murder by disabling her brakes, which accidentally killed a neighbor and child as well and earned him a life sentence at Shawshank Prison. Red also remembers the arrival of an inmate named Andy Dufresne, whose tenure at Shawshank affected the lives of everyone at the prison. Andy was sent to Shawshank for life in 1947 for the cold-blooded murder of his wife, Linda, and her lover, tennis pro Glenn Quentin. Despite the damning evidence placing him at the scene of the crime on the night of the murders, Andy has always maintained his innocence, which Red eventually comes to believe in as well.

Soon after arriving at Shawshank, Andy approaches Red and asks him to procure a rock hammer because he’s interested in rock collecting and carving. After a while, he also pays Red to smuggle in some polishing cloths and then, rather nervously, a large poster of pinup Rita Hayworth. Red fulfills Andy’s requests. Andy dreams of escaping, assuming the new identity, and becoming the proprietor of a small hotel in Mexico. Andy also imagines Red going with him.

Red thinks nothing of this until years later when the prison guards find Andy’s cell empty one morning. The guards search the prison but find nothing, until an extremely frustrated Norton rips the pinup poster from the wall to reveal a gaping hole in the thick concrete. The hole leads to the sewage drainpipe, which empties into the marshes surrounding Shawshank. Red figures that Andy slowly and systematically used the rock hammer and polishing cloths every night for nearly twenty years to carve through the wall. After completing his hole, Red also figures that it took Andy roughly eight years to muster the courage to actually try to escape.

Characters

Andy Dufresne - The protagonist. The former vice president of a bank in Portland, Maine, Andy is thirty years old when he arrives at Shawshank and approximately fifty-eight when he escapes. A short, neat, meticulous man with sandy blond hair, he has small hands and wears gold-rimmed glasses. Most of the other inmates think that Andy is cold and snobbish because he’s always so calm and composed, rarely revealing his inner thoughts or true character. Andy eventually becomes the prison librarian and financial wizard, offering free tax advice to guards and wardens in exchange for protection and favors. He’s one of the few innocent inmates at Shawshank.

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Red - The narrator of the story. A convicted murderer serving a life sentence, Red writes the story to try to make sense of his friendship with Andy, his life in prison, and his hopes for the future. Red is a key figure inside prison, a lifeline to the outside world who can smuggle almost anything into the prison—for a price. Once paroled, he struggles with his newfound freedom, dissatisfied with his job and still without hope for a better future.

Samuel Norton - One of the prison wardens. Norton institutes the new “Inside-Out” program that forces prisoners to work on chain gains to repair roads and public buildings. Even though he claims to be a devout Baptist, he accepts bribes from local construction companies so that the Inside-Out program won’t put them out of business. He uses Andy’s financial expertise to hide his illegal earnings and therefore refuses to help Andy win a retrial. Norton eventually resigns in disgrace after Andy’s escape.

Analysis

The Power of Hope

Hope, more than anything else, drives the inmates at Shawshank and gives them the will to live. Andy’s sheer determination to maintain his own sense of self-worth and escape keeps him from dying of frustration and anger in solitary confinement. Hope is an abstract, passive emotion, akin to the passive, immobile, and inert lives of the prisoners. Andy sets about making hope a reality in the form of the agonizing progress he makes each year tunneling his way through his concrete cell wall. Even Andy’s even-keeled and well-balanced temperament, however, eventually succumb to the bleakness of prison life. Red notes that Tommy Williams’s revelation that he could prove Andy’s innocence was like a key unlocking a cage in Andy’s mind, a cage that released a tiger called Hope. This hope reinvigorates Andy and spreads to many of the other inmates in the prison. In his letter addressed to Red, Andy writes that “hope is a good thing,” which in the end is all that Red has left. Red’s decision to go to Mexico to find Andy is the ultimate proof of Red’s own redemption, not from his life as a criminal but from his compromised state, bereft of hope and with no reason to embrace life or the future. Red’s closing words, as he embarks tentatively onto a new path, show that hope is a difficult concept to sustain both inside the prison and out.

Corruption and Crime

Shawshank blurs the line between right and wrong and challenges the notion that isolating and reforming criminals will turn them into law-abiding citizens. Instead, the prison is a den of corruption, greed, bribery, and money laundering. Everyone exploits the system for their own gain, from Red, who can smuggle anything into the prison, all the way up to the wardens, who profit from forced prison labor. Andy’s willingness to launder Warden Norton’s slush money initially serves as a survival technique, a means of protecting himself by extending his good will to the administration. His complicity and knowledge of the warden’s illegal enterprises, however, keep Norton from ever releasing him for fear that Andy would reveal the warden’s secret. The fact that Shawshank is as corrupt and tainted as the outside world further justifies Andy’s escape from a hypocritical, exploitative system that cares little for the prisoners’ lives or rehabilitation.

Time

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Time serves as both a source of torment as well as the backdrop for the slow, eventual achievement of Andy’s escape, his seemingly impossible goal for nearly twenty-eight years. Shawshank redefines the passage of time for the inmates, especially for the “lifers” like Andy and Red, who can only look forward to death. Hours can seem like a lifetime, and every day seems indistinguishable from the next, adding to the loneliness and burden of imprisonment. Ironically, however, time also proves to be the means of Andy’s escape and salvation and gives him hope throughout his quarter-century in Shawshank. An amateur geologist, Andy realizes that dripping water can erode stone over the span of several million years and that with his small rock hammer and a lot of patience, he too can break through concrete. His devotion to chipping away at the concrete not only allows him to measure the passage of time but also gives him the sense of hope that the other inmates lack.

Rita Hayworth

The pinup posters of Rita Hayworth and the other women represent the outside world, hope, and every inmate’s desire to escape to a normal life. Andy admits as much when he tells Red that sometimes he imagines stepping right through the photograph and into another life. More literally, Rita Hayworth really does remind Andy of his desire to actually break out of Shawshank because of the chiseled hole in the concrete that the posters conceal. As a result, Rita Hayworth embodies the sense of hope that keeps Andy alive and sane and distinguishes him from the other inmates. Even though it takes Andy more than twenty-five years to hammer his way through the wall, the mere fact that he has something to work for keeps him from lapsing into bouts of self-pity as the other inmates do. Having a mission and something to look forward to—even before he knew he would use the hole to break out—kept Andy alive and gave him his “inner light.”

Adaptation

The Shawshank Redemption is a 1994 American drama film written and directed by Frank Darabont and starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman. Adapted from the Stephen King novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, the film tells the story of Andy Dufresne, a banker who spends 19 years in Shawshank State Prison for the murder of his wife and her lover despite his claims of innocence. During his time at the prison, he befriends a fellow inmate, Ellis Boyd "Red" Redding, and finds himself protected by the guards after the warden begins using him in his money laundering operation. The Shawshank Redemption is an allegory for maintaining one's feeling of self-worth when placed in a hopeless position. Andy Dufresne's integrity is an important theme in the story line, especially in prison, where integrity is lacking. Though the film is set in Maine, the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio, served as the fictional Shawshank Prison. The beach at Zihuatanejo, a Mexican coastal town, was made famous by the film. A central scene in the film features the "Letter Duet" ("Canzonetta sull'aria") from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. It has been #1 on IMDb's user- generated Top 250 since 2008, when it surpassed The Godfather.

Stephen King

Stephen King was born on September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine, his home state for the majority of his life. King’s father, Donald, abandoned his family when King was only two, and King never saw or heard from him again. His mother, Nellie, was left with the burden of raising him and his adopted brother, David. In his early years, King occasionally went to live with relatives on both sides of his family. The family moved around, living in a succession of small towns before finally settling in the Maine community of Durham when King was eleven. When King was a teenager, he found a box of

5 his father’s old horror and science-fiction magazines, a discovery that would change his life. He began writing his own tales of horror while still a high school student at Lisbon High School in the mid- 1960s and even attempted to write a few novels. After graduating, King accepted a scholarship to the University of Maine, Orono.

War protests and the politically charged atmosphere of the late 1960s transformed King from a conservative into a student radical who led marches to express dissent about the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War. Shortly after graduation in 1970, King married another aspiring novelist, Tabitha Spruce, and worked as a high school English teacher during the day and at an industrial laundry at night to make ends meet. The couple had a daughter, Naomi, in 1971 and two more children in the following years. Despite his demanding work and family life, King never abandoned his love for writing and eventually published his first novel, Carrie, in 1974. The novel and subsequent 1976 movie raked in enormous profits and catapulted King to instant fame and fortune.

King’s second novel, The Shining (1977), made the bestseller lists, as has every novel he’s written since, making him one of the most popular writers in the world. In the 1980s, he was the author of seven of the decade’s top twenty-five bestsellers, and his works have been translated into nearly every major language. A prolific author, King has produced an average of a book per year for nearly three decades.

“Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” is the opening story in the collection Different Seasons (1982) and embodies classic King themes of fear, confusion, and loss of control, albeit transformed and shifted to the fractured domesticity of a high-security prison. The chills and breathless horror commonplace in much of King’s other writings have been replaced by the psychological torture of living in a confined space for an indeterminate amount of time.

His books have sold more than 350 million copies and many of them have been adapted into feature films, television movies and comic books.

Famous adaptations: Carrie, The Shining, The Green Mile, Christine, The Running Man.

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