All One has in Hell is Hope
Hope is a dangerous ideal. It is not a tangible or quantitative concept and that gives it the potential to be lethal. Hope has such power so that without it, one has nothing; yet with it one can be deluded to believe they have everything. An individual has nothing to live for, but hope. Yet even so it is an emotion that must be created by oneself. One must believe in hope in order to give it any real power. In Frank Darabont's Shawshank Redemption Shawshank Prison is a miserable and wretched place. Hope is a rare emotion reserved for the foolish. Prisoners do not have it, and they tell themselves they do not deserve it. That is until Andy Dufresne comes to Shawshank. When Andy arrives, he brings with him,
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Some ugly stain upon the good. Evil is a poison seeping through the pores of the greedy, the malicious, and the corrupt. When one resigns himself to a life in prison, one’s morals begin to crumble like the walls that surround them. Whether one is a captive of the walls or not, for sometimes; the free men are even more corrupt than the incarcerated ones. Prison can drive anyone to corruption. The only way to fight such corruption is through hope. Sometimes one has no other weapons except their own ideals. Their faith is their only motivator against evil. Andy is symbolic of this hope, not just of his own hope, but hope for the other inmates as well. The Warden is corrupt using his role at the prison for nothing more than personal gain and using Andy for the same. He uses Andy’s accounting skills to get away with it. Abusing the system every way he can, even resorting to punishing the innocent. Andy finds evidence that he may be innocent, yet the Warden refuses to listen denying him and eventually, due to Andy's persistence, punishing him. Andy ends up in the isolation for a month living off nothing, but grain and drain. This only makes Andy more determined. He is an innocent man and, therefore, should be a free man. Yet, that hope is the only power he has. He even tells Red that hope is something only one can have, they can never take it from you and that is right . No matter the outward corruption he faces or his own personal battle with …show more content…
It is easy to lose hope when one is already at a place of loss. Andy lost his case. Therefore lost his freedom. Andy was framed; the loss of his case equated the loss of his freedom. Years and years he can never get back for a crime he did not commit. Yet, Andy believes he can redeem those years . That the walls around him are not impenetrable. He has suffered loss yet his will is too strong to lose hope. Throughout the movie Andy has a poster on the wall of Rita Hayworth. She comes to represent his tie to the outside world and that there is something beyond those prison walls. Yet she also represents Andy’s hope and his determination as she conceals a hole he has been chipping away at for years. Rita Hayworth comes to represent hope. Hope of a better life through that wall. The work he did on the wall is only a testament to his everlasting faith. He worked on that wall after he was raped. He continued to dig it after every time he was turned down for parole. He kept chipping away even after all seemed hopeless in the outside world. Such as when Brooks committed suicide. It represented a man with no hope. Brooks had nothing left to live for and his death brought the same fears to every inmate including Andy. Yet while he faces such tribulations he just kept on digging. Andy never knew what the outside world would bring him but it's his hope that allowed him to persevere. He did not let his fear overpower
Society can be very cruel; hopes and dreams can become reality or vanish away into the shivering winds. It is important to maintain hope when life is crumbling around you and freedom is what humans strive for in order to execute what they please during their existence on earth. Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King, is a clear example of freedom combined with hope, illustrated by the characters of Andy Dufresne and Red. Andy, like Red, never loses hope of leaving prison; furthermore they gain a sense of freedom when departing from Shawshank. Having beliefs, in addition to fighting for what you believe is right are virtues that help you to strive for success which ultimately, lets you reach for freedom and hope.
During the film Shawshank Redemption there is a very prominent theme of hope. Shawshank Redemption demonstrates positive and negative ways in which the main characters Andy, Brooks, Tommy and Red display hope. Through out the movie Frank Darabont gives us an insight to how each character connects to the theme of hope. Each character connects differently to hope. For example andy persevering through digging the tunnel, Red connects to hope by become friends with Andy, Tommy gets his high school diploma and finally Brook, although institutionalized became accustomed to being the librarian for many years of his life time in Shawshank prison
The creators of this movie used several effective, and often subtle, methods to illustrate the hope found in Andy and his surroundings. Andy was always portrayed as a clean-cut and well-groomed prisoner with his shirt always buttoned and his hair always combed. This self-respect was in great contrast to the other prisoners who were portrayed as dirty, stereotypical prisoners. The common prisoners also had vocabularies and grammar that were far inferior to Andy’s. The distinctions between Andy and the common prisoners showed that Andy was different, those differences were that he had hope.
First, Andy preserves his self-respect by fighting or defending himself from the rape squad of Shawshank Prison known as “The Sisters”.
Hope Springs Eternal is a story that demonstrates how important it is to keep hope alive. Throughout the entire story, Andy was different from most everybody else, especially the other inmates. This was something readily picked out by the minister/warden. He had accused Andy of walking around as if he where at a “cocktail party”. Red explained it better when he described some of the qualities in Andy that made the warden say what he did. He always walked light footed and always kept his shoulders squared. He never developed that kind of hazy dead look that the other inmates had. Nor did he adopt their hunched over sluggish walk when it came time to go back to their cages. The thing that constantly beamed from him, and differentiated him so much from everybody else was the thing he never gave up; hope.
"Come on George, tell me, like how you done it before .". "You get a kick out of it don't you; well here it goes like ." (13) George has told Lennie about their dream many times and yet Lennie always wants to hear it one more time. It was been told to Lennie so many times that even he can memorize the dream, meaning Lennie really loves the dream and even want to hear it more. Dreams can give people the will to live and the will to fight. People can lose their will to live or to achiever their goal if the dream is lost. Dream is the most important thing for George and Lennie because it's the only thing they can depend on to live.
“Keep hope alive!” “Yes! We can.” All of these are slogans of inspiration that define the human spirit. Without hope life would be dull with nothing to work toward in a positive fashion. In the movie The Shawshank Redemption (1994), the director, Frank Darabot, uses time and space to slowly unfold author, Stephen King’s, short story entitled, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. Time serves as a dual reference of torture as well as the locale for the slow, eventual achievement of Andy’s escape, his seemingly impossible goal for nearly twenty-eight years. Shawshank redefines the lapse of time for the inmates, especially for the “lifers” like Andy and Red, who can only look forward to death. The implementation of hours can seem like an eternity, and every day seems fuzzy from the next, adding to the seclusion and affliction of imprisonment. Ironically, however, time also verifies the means of Andy’s escape and redemption and gives him optimism throughout his quarter-century in Shawshank.
Burgess expresses the idea that man can not be completely good or evil and must have both in order to create a moral choice. The book deals upon reforming a criminal with only good morals and conditioning an automated response to "evil." Burgess enforces the idea of the medical model of corrections, in terms of rehabilitating an offender, which is up to the individual. That one should determine the cause and then find an exclusive treatment to resolve that individual's case, then apply it. This is the case with the character Alex, a juvenile delinquent introduced into prisonization then conditioned by governmental moral standards. This lack of personal moral choice imposed upon Alex creates conflicting situations in which he has no control over. This is apparent when trying to readjust into society. As conflicts arise within the spectrum of criminal justice the main focus is revolved around the corrections aspect of reforming the criminal element.
The movie Shawshank Redemption depicts the story of Andy Dufresne, who is an innocent man that is sentenced to life in prison. At Shawshank, both Andy and the viewers, witness typical prison subculture.
“Hope is defined as the action of wishing or desiring that something will occur.” Hope helps people move forward in life to see what’s coming next for them. For example, “I had no right to let myself die. What would he do without me? I was his sole support” (Wiesel, “Night”.) This quote explains the effects of hope in a pitiful situation. Eliezer Wiesel and his father were torn apart, mentally and physically from everything they
He could have given up at any moment, but instead he decided to go for it finally coming out on the other side. The hole in the wall was no easy task, but I would be willing to bet it was more fun than crawling through a 50 inch diameter tube full of shit for about half a mile. Laying in a pile of poop would be enough to make some people call it quits, but instead of giving up, Andy crawled through the poo filled tunnel, making it to freedom. Never once did he give up hope. Luke on the other hand didn’t literally have to crawl through shit, but did go through some shit of his own. After being put in the hot box for a week due to finding out that his mother died, not for doing anything wrong, but for fear he might try something, he does try something, he try’s to run for the first time. Almost successful, the dogs end up sniffing him out, and he receives a beating due to, “a failure to communicate.” Being his first escape attempt they gave him minimal punishment. Time in the box, and a nice set of chains for his ankles. He then continues to try and run again, managing to remove his chain, he once again gets caught, this time being forced to do unnecessary labor, and then immediately receiving a deadly beating. Having everyone, including the guards, thinking that he had given up hope, he attempts to escape one last time by stealing a truck, ultimately resulting in his death. This shows how much hope Luke had, being as he died fighting for his own
Stephen King’s “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” depicts Red, a man imprisoned for a triple homicide, and his telling of the story of another prisoner, Andy Dufresne, from his trial and incarceration to his valiant escape. Though the novel itself is arguably about Red and his journey to true freedom, the passage depicting Andy’s rise to favoritism with Byron Hadley directly correlates with the remainder of his time at Shawshank and is entirely about Andy. The conflict, which on the surface appears to be a normal conversation, reveals character traits that alter the understanding of Andy by the reader, surrounding prisoners, and the Shawshank staff for the remainder of the novel. Andy’s interaction and subtle domination of the discussion creates a power shift that continues to grow until his eventual escape from Shawshank. Through Red’s narration, King utilizes characterization of Andy
When Andy arrives in prison Red is serving a life sentence for a murder he committed when he was a young adult. In the film Red introduces himself as “the guy that can get it for you”, him being able to get certain items into the prison for other people. Because of this ability Red is placed on a certain pedestal of importance when looked at by other prisoners. Red’s only purpose in life and in the prison has become smuggling items into the prison. If he were to be let out into the real world, that purpose would be taken away, and he would have a very hard time finding meaning in his life. In this matter Ellis was institutionalized, just as Brookes had been. A moment when this is supported in the film is when Red tells Andy "These walls are funny. First you hate them, then you get used to them, until it gets to you depend on them. That 's institutionalized." Red has grown dependent on his role in the prison for meaning in life, and without it his life has no
Our image is a visual representation of tof the contrast between the power of hope and the burden of institutionalization. The character of Andy and the wardens re the embodiment of these two central themes. We used the contrast between the flashlight and the watch tower to highlight the prevalence of andy hope in such a dark and desolate environment The image drawn in an elevated first person / bird's eye view of the walls of the prison. Andy’s hand is on the top right hand corner to show that in the power of hope that he possessed was above the any thing that the prison threw at him.
The “Hope” is optimism. Freedom from hope is freedom to your soul. You can no longer hurt yourself by living. It is hard to believe that being hopeless leads to living, but living is an imprisonment. We try to be the best we can be but does life limit us?