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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Institutionalization vs. Freedom
Stories, Memory, and Hope
Gender Stereotypes, Sex, and Violence
Corruption, Purity, and Accommodation
Justice and Rehabilitation
Summary
Analysis
The narrator introduces himself as a prison stereotype, the man “who can get it for you,” i.e. obtain contraband. Unlike most prisoners in Shawshank, he admits he committed the crime he’s in prison for: he cut the brakes on his wife’s car after buying a life insurance policy for her. His wife happened to give a neighbor and her young son a ride that day, and all three died. At 20, the narrator was convicted of a triple homicide and given three consecutive life sentences.
The narrator, introducing himself, does not tell readers his name, only his role in prison society. This omission suggests the narrator identifies with the prison environment rather than considering himself an individual who will one day be free. He also gives no hints about why he’s telling a story, creating mystery and suspense about his motives. With matter-of-fact brevity, he reveals he murdered his wife –and accidentally killed two other people in the process. This backstory hints that male violence against women may be common in the culture the novella describes. It also makes the reader wonder what kind of person the narrator is. On the one hand, the narrator admits the crime he committed and clearly did not intend two of the three deaths he caused, which may imply his three consecutive life sentences are an unjust punishment. On the other hand, the narrator freely admits to smuggling contraband—“it,” whatever it is—which suggests that prison, rather than rehabilitating him, has perhaps made him more likely to commit additional crimes.
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The narrator acknowledges he committed a horrible act but contends it’s history, like “the news of Hitler and Mussolini and FDR’s alphabet soup agencies.” As to whether prison has “rehabilitated” him, he professes not to know the word’s meaning. While he may figure it out, “that is the future . . . something cons teach themselves not to think about.” He grew up poor, married a rich girl because she got pregnant, and discovered his father-in-law intended to control him and treat him like an animal. The miserable situation eventually led him to murder. In hindsight, he wishes he hadn’t committed the murder, but he doesn’t equate that wish with his rehabilitation.
“FDR’s alphabet soup agencies” refers to U.S. government agencies created under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal (1933 – 1939), projects and reforms intended to help struggling Americans during the Great Depression, which began in 1929. This reference, as well as the allusions to Adolf Hitler (who became Nazi Germany’s fascist dictator in 1933) and Benito Mussolini (Italy’s fascist prime minister from 1922 to 1943), suggest the narrator murdered his wife in the 1930s. The narrator’s refusal to believe that prison has rehabilitated him, despite his regret at having committed murder, suggests two things: first, the narrator is genuinely guilty and self-critical, and second, prison doesn’t help the imprisoned become better people. The narrator’s offhand comment that the future is “something cons teach themselves not to think about,” meanwhile, suggests that prison destroys or erodes prisoners’ capacity for hope.
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The narrator wants to tell a story not about himself, but about a man named Andy Dufresne—the narrator is simply providing context first. He reiterates he’s been obtaining contraband for other prisoners for almost 40 years. He smuggles more to build up his reputation than for money, and he won’t smuggle firearms or serious drugs because he’s been involved in enough murder. In 1949, Andy Dufresne asks him to smuggle Rita Hayworth, and he agrees.
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Entering prison, Andy Dufresne is a small, fair-haired, 30-year-old man with glasses and “always clean” fingernails. Before prison, he had a high-ranking job in a Portland bank. He was convicted of murdering his wife (Linda) and the man she was having an affair with (Glenn Quentin). The narrator says that in his decades of incarceration, he’s only trusted 10 prisoners’ claims of innocence. He now believes Andy’s innocent, but he wouldn’t have believed it if he’d been a juror at Andy’s trial.
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The district attorney prosecuting Andy wanted to run for higher office. He used the “juicy” trial to raise his profile. Andy agreed with the prosecutor’s account in some respects: in 1947 his wife Linda started taking golf lessons at a country club and began an affair with her instructor, Glenn Quentin. Andy found out, and on September 10, 1947, he and Linda fought. When she told him she wanted a divorce, he replied “he would see her in hell” first. Linda went to Glenn’s, where they were found shot to death the next morning.
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Glenn and Linda were each shot four times, which the district attorney claimed showed Andy was an emotionless, premeditated murderer. On the stand, a pawnshop worker said that two days before the murders, Andy had bought a .38 from him. A bartender said Andy had three whiskeys in the country club on September 10, announced he was going to Glenn’s, and said the bartender “could ‘read about the rest of it in the papers.’” A clerk at a store near Glenn’s said that later the same night, Andy bought cigarettes, beer, and dishtowels. A detective said that they found beer cans, cigarette butts, and tire tracks matching Andy’s car near Glenn’s house. Inside the house, they found dishtowels with bullet holes in them, which the detective believes were used as makeshift silencers.
Andy testified that after he began to hear rumors about Linda and Glenn, he followed Linda when she’d said she’d be shopping and saw her go to Glenn’s house. Emotionlessly, he claimed he bought the .38 because he was thinking of killing himself. The narrator believes that because Andy was so emotionally controlled, the jurors disbelieved him.
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Andy also testified he’d been drinking continuously between his discovery of the affair and Linda’s murder. The narrator thinks the jurors didn’t believe Andy due to his emotional cool. But in prison, Andy asked the narrator to procure him only four drinks a year: two on his birthday, one on Christmas, and one on New Year’s Eve. The narrator believes Andy drank rarely because he’d had bad experiences drinking. In court, Andy testified he was so drunk the night Linda and Glenn were murdered that he couldn’t remember much. He remembered going to the country club bar but not talking to the bartender; he remembered buying beer but not dishtowels.
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In prison, Andy and the narrator discuss the dishtowels. Andy speculates that the police, who have discovered dishtowels in Glenn’s house, may have planted a false memory of selling dishtowels in the man who sold Andy beer—or that the man fabricated the memory because the attention the notorious case gave him turned his head. After all, Andy notes, “memory is such a goddam subjective thing.” Despite his own memory gaps, Andy’s sure he didn’t buy the dishtowels: he was too drunk to have considered silencing his gun.
In court, Andy testified he’d staked out Glenn’s house while smoking and drinking beer but then driven home. In cross examination, the district attorney pushed back against Andy’s claim that he bought the .38 to kill himself, claiming he didn’t seem “the suicidal type.” The district attorney also heaped scorn on Andy’s claim that he’d thrown his .38 in the river the day before the murders, as the police dragged the river and couldn’t find the gun. When the DA called this “convenient,” Andy said it was “decidedly inconvenient”—the gun could prove his innocence. When the DA asked how Andy would explain the murders, since Glenn and Linda weren’t robbed (and so there was no alternative motive), Andy couldn’t. The jury voted to convict him after two and a half hours of deliberation, including lunch.
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In 1955, Andy and the narrator discuss what may have happened the night of the murders. Andy thinks a “burglar” or a “psychopath” killed Linda and Glenn; he blames his conviction on a coincidence, which “condemned [him] to spend the rest of his life in Shawshank—or the part of it that mattered.” Though later he begins to get parole hearings, the narrator hears that the parole board keeps voting unanimously or near unanimously to deny parole, and Andy stays in prison until 1975. Jokingly, the narrator speculates they might finally have paroled Andy in 1983.
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Then the narrator tells a story about a prisoner who kept a pet pigeon named Jake. After the prisoner was paroled, he let the pigeon go—but the next week, another prisoner saw the pigeon, “look[ing] starved,” dead in the exercise yard.
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In 1948, the first time Andy approaches the narrator for something, it occurs in the Shawshank exercise yard. The narrator has already heard about Andy’s reputation for standoffishness but prefers not “to listen to rumors” if he has the chance to form his own opinions. Andy asks the narrator to get him a rock-hammer. When the narrator asks why Andy wants it, Andy asks whether he usually asks customers that. The narrator says he does if customers are asking for something that could be used as a murder weapon.
As the narrator and Andy are talking, a baseball comes hurtling at them. Andy catches it casually and throws it right back. Given the narrator’s reputation and influence around the prison, he’s impressed that Andy isn’t “sucking up” to him.
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Andy explains to the narrator that he used to collect rocks. He sifts through dirt from the exercise yard, finds a piece of quartz, and shows it to the narrator. The narrator finds the quartz oddly touching, because it reminds him of free settings, for example “a small, quick-running stream.” Yet he insists Andy could use the rock-hammer to kill someone or try to escape. Andy denies he has enemies and laughs at the idea you could use a rock-hammer to tunnel out.
The narrator and Andy settle on a price for the rock-hammer, 10 dollars. When the narrator asks Andy whether he has the money, Andy says he does. The narrator will later learn Andy smuggled more than 500 dollars into the prison by hiding it in his rectum.
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The narrator tells Andy that if the correctional officers catch Andy with the hammer, they’ll take it away, put Andy in solitary confinement for several weeks, and record the infraction on Andy’s record. He warns Andy that if Andy tells them who procured the hammer, he’ll never get anything for Andy again—and he’ll get some other prisoners to beat Andy up. Andy agrees to the narrator’s terms.
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Andy sneaks 10 dollars to the narrator a few days later. The narrator procures the hammer and passes it to Andy through an intermediary, though he knows the hammer could kill someone and worries Andy might use it as a weapon, since Andy has “begun having trouble with the sisters.” The next weekend, Andy—covered in bruises—thanks the narrator in the exercise yard. As Andy walks away, the narrator sees him palm a rock and hide it in his sleeve. The narrator thinks well of Andy’s sleight-of-hand and his resilience. He doesn’t see Andy much over the next stretch of time, since Andy is frequently punished with solitary confinement.
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The narrator explains what “the sisters” means in Shawshank. He distinguishes between three types of prisoners who have sex with other men: otherwise straight men whose libidos demand sex of some kind, even when women aren’t available; men who realize they are gay during incarceration and “play the female”; and “the sisters.” Though some gay prisoners “have ‘crushes’” on the sisters and would have consensual sex with them, the sisters are men who prefer to rape other prisoners.
The sisters begin attacking Andy soon after his incarceration—attacks the narrator attributes to Andy’s slightness, attractiveness, and “that very quality of self-possession” the narrator finds likable. Andy’s first week at Shawshank, the sisters grope him in the showers—and he hits one, Bogs Diamond, in the face. A correctional officer breaks up the fight. Later, four of Bogs’s friends rape Andy in the laundry. The narrator, who’s been raped before, says that afterwards, a man usually bleeds for several days; he uses toilet paper to stanch the bleeding to avoid other prisoners’ joking about his “period.” Though the rapes don’t cause lasting bodily trauma, the narrator admits they can damage a man’s sense of identity.
The narrator speculates that after the first rape, Andy realizes what all the sisters’ victims realize: he’ll be raped no matter what, but he can choose whether to resist. When Bogs comes after Andy with two of his friends, Andy breaks one friend’s nose. All three rape Andy, and then Bogs menaces Andy with a razor and demands oral sex. Andy replies, “Anything of yours that you stick in my mouth, you’re going to lose it.” When Bogs says he’ll stab Andy in the head if he bites, Andy explains that head trauma causes people to “bite down” on reflex. Instead of continuing to assault Andy, Bogs and his friends pummel him. Andy and his assailants end up in solitary confinement for fighting, though Andy and the man whose nose he broke go to the infirmary first.
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The summer after Andy enters Shawshank, Bogs is very violently beaten one night. The narrator speculates that Andy, who smuggled money into prison, “bribed” some poorly paid correctional officers to attack Bogs. After his beating, Bogs stops trying to rape Andy or anyone else. Other sisters keep attacking Andy, but because he violently resists, they target him less. Correctional officers punish Andy with solitary confinement for fighting, but the narrator speculates Andy “g[ets] along with himself” and so minds solitary less. The narrator notes that the sisters stop attacking Andy “almost completely” in 1950, “a part of the story I’ll get to in due time.”
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In autumn 1948, the narrator sells Andy six rock-blankets, tools for polishing rocks. Almost half a year later, during the prison’s monthly film screening, Andy—acting furtive—asks the narrator for a pin-up poster of Rita Hayworth. The narrator, amused by Andy’s demeanor, asks whether Andy wants a small or a four-foot poster. Andy asks for the four-foot one. The narrator offers to sell it to him at “wholesale price,” because Andy’s bought from him in the past and never used the hammer to attack the sisters.
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The narrator sells a lot of pin-up posters. The people running the prison are aware the prisoners sell contraband, but when the contraband is harmless, like posters, administrators pretend to believe prisoners’ relatives sent it. When the prisoners let off steam harmlessly, it’s easier for administrators. After the narrator gets Andy the Rita Hayworth poster, he sees it hung up in Andy’s cell while he’s walking to breakfast, Rita’s face striped by shadows from the bars on the cell window.
The narrator announces he’s going to explain how Andy got the sisters to leave him alone, once and for all, in 1950—an event that also leads to Andy switching prison jobs, from the laundry to the library, where he worked until he exited Shawshank “earlier this year.” The narrator admits that much of what he’s recounted about Andy is prison “hearsay” and that Andy is almost “more legend than man” in Shawshank, but that he witnessed the particular event he’s about to recount.
By the time the event occurs, Andy and the narrator are decent friends. This is in part because, several weeks after the narrator got Andy the Rita Hayworth pin-up poster, Andy sent the narrator (through an intermediary) two beautifully polished quartz crystals, which filled the narrator with “awe for the man’s brute persistence.”
The event occurs in May 1950, when the narrator, Andy, and several other prisoners are chosen to tar the roof of the prison’s license-plate factory. Six correctional officers guard the prison workers, including one named Byron Hadley. Hadley is friends with Greg Stammas, who becomes warden in 1953 after the previous warden is fired for making money off of the prison garage.
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While watching the prisoners tar the roof, Hadley is whining about a piece of good luck. The narrator notes that some correctional officers become “saintly” because they recognize how lucky they are in comparison to prisoners—but Hadley is not one of the saints. Hadley always sees the worst in any situation. He's complaining loudly to another correctional officer, Mert Entwhistle, that his estranged older brother, whom he disliked, has died and left him $35,000—and he’s going to have to pay taxes on it.
Andy stops working, walks over to Hadley, and asks whether Hadley’s wife is trustworthy. Hadley threatens to throw Andy off the roof if he doesn’t get back to work. The narrator believes that no matter how Andy reacts, he’ll get beaten—but he can avoid worsening his punishment. He wants to warn Andy but keeps working in silence, because he takes care of himself. Andy rephrases the question to Hadley: it’s not so much about “trust” as about whether Hadley’s wife “would ever go behind [his] back.” Hadley tells Mert they’ll throw Andy off the roof.
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The two correctional officers grab him. Andy, coolly, tells Hadley that if he can control his wife, he can keep all $35,000. After Hadley tells Mert to stop dragging Andy toward the roof’s edge, Andy explains that by law, spouses can make a gift of as much as $60,000 to each other without the IRS levying taxes on it. Hadley says he thinks Andy must be lying, but the narrator can tell Hadley’s suddenly hopeful.
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As a former banker, Andy offers to do the paperwork arranging Hadley’s gift in exchange for three beers for each prisoner working on the roof. The narrator and the other prisoners suddenly sense that even though Hadley could still throw Andy off the roof and get some other banker to arrange the gift, Andy has bested Hadley. Hadley agrees to get the beers, and Andy tells him he’ll list the forms Hadley needs and complete them so Hadley can sign them. Hadley threatens violence against Andy if Andy’s somehow cheating him, and Andy affirms he’s heard.
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Hadley gets the beer on the prisoners’ penultimate day tarring the roof. Everyone drinks except Andy, who just sits and smiles. The narrator notes that while fewer than a dozen prisoners are working on the roof, hundreds of prisoners later claim to have been there. Returning to the question of whether the Andy he remembers is a person or a myth, the narrator suggests he’s “somewhere in between.” He notes Andy had an unusual quality for a prisoner: self-esteem, or hope for a good outcome, or “a sense of freedom”—an “inner light” the narrator sees him “lose” just one time.
After the roofing job, Hadley and Stammas warn the sisters not to assault Andy—and they don’t. Two years later, the man who ran the prison library gets paroled at age 68. Unable to adjust to free life, he dies a year later in a nursing home for impoverished elderly people. Andy becomes the librarian for the next 23 years, slowly making improvements. He creates a suggestion box for books prisoners would like to read, sends letters to book clubs and getting discounted “major selections”; and buys how-to manuals related to prisoners’ hobbies and novels by “Erie Stanley Gardner and Louis L’Amour.”
Two years after becoming the librarian, Andy starts sending letters to Maine’s State Senate. Stammas—now the warden—tells Andy in a condescending, fake-friendly way that state legislators won’t fund a prison library, only “more bars” and “more guards.” Andy asks Stammas to think about a tiny drip of water eroding concrete over a long period. Stammas laughs and volunteers to send the letters for Andy, provided Andy pays postage. Eight years later, the legislature sends Andy $200. Though the narrator suspects they sent the money to stop the letters, Andy writes even more—and gets money for the library every year.
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After Andy helps Hadley avoid taxes on his inheritance, guards start asking him for financial advice. He ends up helping almost all the staff. When Stammas becomes warden, Andy helps Stammas more materially. The narrator doesn’t know the details, but he does know that sometimes free people who care about certain prisoners bribe prison staff so the prisoners get better treatment, the companies that sold equipment for prison industries likely bribe prison administrators, and in the 1960s administrators are involved in drug smuggling. All this “illicit income” needs laundering—and Andy launders it.
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Around 1960, Andy and the narrator—whom Andy calls “Red”—discuss the money-laundering. Andy claims not to feel guilty and suggests, humorously, it isn’t that different from the work he did before prison. When Red expresses uneasiness about the drugs, Andy points out the guards sell the drugs, not him.
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Andy says some ineffectual people never do anything wrong, while other people will do any horrible thing for money. He asks whether anyone has ever suggested a “contract” to Red. When Red says yes, Andy says he knows Red didn’t take it, because he and Red see a “third choice” between ineffectual goodness and evil: “You balance off your walk through the hog-wallow against what it gains you.” Andy launders money; in exchange, the administrators let him do what he wants with the library, where more than 20 prisoners have read books and studied to “pass their high school equivalency exams.”
Red says Andy also gets his own cell. Andy agrees he prefers it that way. Red notes that though the prison population rose dramatically with the war on drugs in the 60s—which Red calls “ridiculous penalties for the use of a little reefer”—Andy only ever had one cellmate, a Native American man named Normaden.
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In 1958, Red looks in the mirror, realizes he’s 40 and has lived in prison since 1938, notices gray in his red hair, and feels afraid. In 1959, a journalist goes undercover at Shawshank to investigate corruption, and Stammas flees, becoming a fugitive—but Andy isn’t punished. Later that year, a new warden arrives. For eight months, Andy receives no special treatment, and during this time his cellmate Normaden moves in. Then Andy begins working for the new administrators, and Normaden moves out again.
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At one point, Normaden—who has a speech impediment due to “a harelip and a cleft palate”—tells Red he liked Andy, who never mocked him, but that Andy didn’t want him there. Further, he wanted to leave because the cell was freezing with a “big draft.”
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In 1955, Andy starts replacing the pin-up poster of Rita Hayworth with various other pin-ups, eventually including Raquel Welch—whom Andy keeps up longest, for six years—and finally Linda Ronstadt. When Red asks Andy about his attachment to the pin-ups, Andy says they represent “freedom.” He liked the Welch poster because she was on a beach, which made him feel like he could “step right through” the poster. When Red says he’s never taken that perspective on pin-ups, Andy says Red will understand later. Red concludes that later he does understand—and it reminds him of Normaden complaining about the big draft.
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In 1963, Andy temporarily loses the special quality of self-control or hope Red attributes to him. The new warden, a devout Baptist named Samuel Norton who gives every new prisoner a Bible, is the “foulest hypocrite” Red’s seen in administration. He takes up the prior wardens’ illegal businesses. In addition, he establishes an out-of-prison work program, “Inside-Out,” that he uses to embezzle money and extort bribes from businesses that want to avoid being underbid by the prison, which has access to prisoners’ unpaid labor. Andy helped Norton launder money throughout. Red suspects “what happened happened” due to Norton’s fear that Andy could inform on him if Andy were free.
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In 1962, a 27-year-old career thief named Tommy Williams enters Shawshank. His wife convinces him to study for his high school equivalency while in Shawshank, so Tommy goes to Andy for books and help. Tommy, who likes Andy, can’t figure out how Andy ended up in prison—and Andy won’t tell him. Early in 1963, Tommy asks his partner on work detail about Andy’s crime. When his partner mentions that Andy was convicted of killing his wife and a golf instructor named Glenn Quentin, Tommy stops working, goes pale and says, “Glenn Quentin, oh my God.” Then a correctional officer clubs Tommy in the head and sends him to solitary for stopping work.
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Once Tommy’s out of solitary, he asks several prisoners, including Red, about Andy’s crime. Sometime later, Tommy goes to talk to Andy. Andy, gobsmacked and hopeful, makes an appointment with Warden Norton for the next day. In the appointment, Andy tells Norton what Tommy told him: on a previous prison sentence, Tommy had a cellmate named Elwood Blatch, an extremely jumpy burglar, a “big tall guy,” “bald,” with “green eyes set way down deep in the sockets.” Blatch told Tommy he’d committed several murders. When Tommy asked who Blatch had killed, Blatch bragged that some lawyer was convicted and incarcerated in Shawshank prison because Blatch killed the lawyer’s wife and another man, a rich golfer named Glenn Quentin who Blatch thought might keep lots of money in the house.
Red knows why Andy wants to see Norton immediately: Blatch may still be incarcerated and thus easy to locate, or he may have been released already. Moreover, while Tommy’s account doesn’t match all the facts—Andy is a banker, not a lawyer; Blatch claimed to have stolen money from Glenn Quentin, while the police claimed no signs of robbery—Andy remembers an employee at the country club where Glenn Quentin was an instructor who matched Tommy’s description of Blatch. The employee would have known, as Blatch did, that Glenn Quentin was a golf professional and a rich man.
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Red hears about Andy and Norton’s meeting from a prisoner who eavesdrops while cleaning an office adjoining Norton’s. Andy, in a strange voice, recounts what Tommy told him. Norton expresses skepticism and suggests Tommy, who likes Andy, invented the story to please him. When Andy says he never told Tommy about the country-club employee matching Blatch’s description, Norton accuses Andy of “selective perception” and claims that even if they found Blatch, he’d never confess. Andy calls Norton “obtuse.” Shouting excitedly, he explains the club will have documents with Blatch’s name on them and other employees can testify he was there. If Tommy testifies too, Andy can get a retrial. Norton shouts for a guard and has Andy dragged to solitary, while Andy shouts, “don’t you understand it’s my life?”
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Andy spends 20 days in solitary. Red explains that solitary confinement has a long history in Maine. In the 18th century, people were executed for serious crimes; for minor crimes, they were forced to dig a deep hole and live inside it for months, while a jailor occasionally brought them rotten food and poured water into the same bucket they used for urination. Shawshank’s solitary, meanwhile, has a single light, which turns off at 8 p.m., a bunk, and a seatless toilet. Though it’s better than living in a hole, “in situations like that, subdivisions of terrible tend to get lost.”
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After getting out of solitary, Andy requests another meeting with Norton. Though Norton says no, Andy keeps requesting a meeting until, months later, Norton agrees. Andy tells Red about the conversation years later, but what happens is this: when Andy tries to reassure Norton he wouldn’t tell anyone about the money laundering if released, Norton cuts him off, threatens to close Shawshank’s library, and says he can’t pay attention to “crazy stories” like Andy’s.
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Andy says he’ll be getting a lawyer, because with Tommy’s testimony, he can make a case. Norton says Tommy’s been transferred to Cashman, a lower-security prison that lets prisoners on furlough to visit their families. Andy, suspecting Norton transferred Tommy to pay for his silence about Blatch, asks why Norton would do that. Norton claims he’s helped Andy out: there was an Elwood Blatch in the prison Tommy named, but he’s been paroled and can’t be located. When Andy asks whether Norton knows that prison’s warden, Norton, smirking coolly, admits he does. When Andy again asks why Norton would transfer Tommy, Norton says he hates Andy’s superior look and likes seeing it wiped off his face.
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Andy says in that case, he’ll stop giving Norton free financial help. Norton replies that he’s sending Andy for solitary for 30 days and that, unless Andy keeps working for him, he’ll shut down the library, give Andy a cellmate, take his rock collection, and tell the guards to let other prisoners rape him. Andy keeps working for Norton.
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Andy continues his routines, working in the library, finding and polishing rocks, and buying a new rock-hammer from Red in 1967. Sometimes he gives away the rocks he polishes and sculpts. Red has five, and when he looks at them, he considers “what a man can do, if he has time enough and the will to use it, a drop at a time.” Yet though Andy keeps up his routines, he talks less and suffers darker moods for four years after his confrontation with Norton.
Red notices Andy beginning to feel better during the 1967 World Series, when the Boston Red Sox are playing and the prisoners track the games feverishly. Though the other prisoners become depressed after the Red Sox lose the Series, Andy keeps his improved mood. A few weeks after the Red Sox’s loss, Red sees Andy sitting in the sun holding a couple rocks. Andy invites Red to sit and gives him the rocks as gifts. They discuss that in the coming year, Red will have served 30 years. When Andy asks Red whether he believes he (Red himself) will ever be paroled, Red says it won’t happen till he’s ancient and senile.
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Andy tells Red that after prison, he’ll move to a Mexican town on the Pacific called Zihuatanejo. He claims Mexican people say the Pacific remembers nothing: “And that’s where I want to finish out my life, Red. In a warm place that has no memory.” He tells Red his plans to open a hotel there for newlyweds.
When Red asks where Andy will get money to start this business, Andy says there are two kinds of men: men who, when a hurricane heads toward them, assume it’ll spare their house, and men who assume it’ll tear their house down and act accordingly. When Red asks whether Andy acted accordingly, Andy says yes: after his wife Linda’s murder, a friend named Jim, who died in 1961, helped him sell his stocks. After Andy’s conviction, Jim also created a new identity for Andy—Peter Stevens—with fake documents. Red points out that creating a fake identity is a crime, so Jim must’ve been an excellent friend. Andy explains he and Jim “were in the war together, France, Germany, the occupation.” While Andy was in prison, Jim invested Andy’s savings for Peter Stevens, so that Peter Stevens is now worth approximately $370,000.
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Red asks why Andy, with all that money, didn’t get a great lawyer like “Clarence Darrow, or whoever’s passing for him these days” to make Tommy testify. Andy explains that, with him in prison and Jim dead, he can’t access Peter Stevens’s money. He tells Red that in a town called Buxton, against a rock wall in a hayfield, Jim left a paperweight Andy once owned. Beneath the paperweight is the key to a safe deposit box rented in Peter Stevens’s name and paid out of his money by lawyers Jim hired. Inside the box are Peter Stevens’s identity documents, stock certifications, and so forth. Andy admits he worries new construction will at some point cover the field and key in concrete. When Red asks how the situation doesn’t drive Andy insane, Andy replies, “So far, all quiet on the Western front.”
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When Red points out that Andy may not leave prison for a long time, Andy says he may not be in for as long as Norton believes—and, given his innocence, his Mexican hotel dream isn’t unreasonable. Then, casually, he says his hotel will need “a man who knows how to get things.” Red replies he wouldn’t survive outside of prison; Shawshank has made him “an institutional man.” When Andy claims Red’s selling himself short, Red retorts he never graduated high school. Andy replies that high school and prison don’t by themselves determine a person’s worth. When Red again protests he couldn’t survive outside prison, Andy asks him just to consider the offer.
As Andy walks off, Red marvels at how Andy’s sense of freedom makes Red “feel free.” Yet Red loses that free feeling once he’s back in his cell. That night he dreams he’s in a hayfield, trying to retrieve a key beneath a huge rock but not strong enough to move the stone, while bloodhounds bark nearby.
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This conversation gets Red on “the subject of jailbreaks.” Prisoners who escape over the wall never succeed; they’re caught in the act by searchlights or apprehended soon after because their uniforms make them conspicuous in Shawshank’s rustic environs. Once a man escaped in a laundry delivery, but the guards have gotten wise to that trick. Several men escaped while working for Norton’s Inside-Out Program: three slipped away from their correctional officer, who liked hunting, while a stag distracted him. One man, Sid Nedeau, managed to walk out unnoticed during a correctional officer shift change. Andy and Red like to joke about Nedeau; after they hear about D.B. Cooper’s airplane hijacking, Andy claims Cooper must have really been Nedeau.
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Though escapes do happen, a prisoner must be extraordinarily fortunate to succeed. Red guesses 10 prisoners escaped Shawshank from the time he entered to his conversation with Andy about Zihuatanejo. He also suspects many escapees end up in other prisons, because prisoners “get institutionalized” and secretly want to stay in prison where the environment is familiar. Red believes he’s institutionalized, though Andy isn’t.
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Red thinks Andy may have a shot at escaping, but escape will be difficult for Andy in particular, because Norton is surveilling him especially and would never let him into the Inside-Out Program. Red tries to convince Andy to get a retrial, because he thinks that’s a more likely path to freedom. Yet in 1975, Andy escapes, and as of 1976, he’s still free. Red believes Andy, under the name Peter Stevens, now owns a hotel in Zihuatanejo.
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At 6:30 in the morning on March 12, 1975, the guards count the prisoners from Cellblock 5 on their way to breakfast and, after some confusion, realize Andy is missing. The guards contact Norton, search Shawshank, and alert the local police. No one thinks to search Andy’s cell until the evening, when Norton looks behind Andy’s pin-up poster of Linda Ronstadt and gets “one hell of a shock.”
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Red hears from a prisoner who eavesdropped that, earlier that day, Norton berated the Captain of the Guards for losing Andy. Though the Captain claimed Andy wasn’t still in Shawshank, Norton shouted that no one knew exactly when Andy escaped, but he was accounted for at 9 p.m. roll call the previous night, and it was “impossible” he’d gotten clean away. He demanded the Captain bring Andy back that afternoon—but by the afternoon, Andy’s still gone. Though the guards question the prisoners, including Red, no one knows what happened. Eventually Norton storms into Andy’s cell, swipes the depleted rock collection off the windowsill (Andy took some rocks with him), and tears down the Linda Rondstadt pin-up poster in fury—revealing a big hole in the cell wall.
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Norton, out of his mind with anger, demands the Captain climb into the hole. The Captain refuses. When Norton threatens to fire him, the Captain offers Norton his gun—and Red imagines he can “hear Andy Dufresne laughing.” Eventually, though, Norton and the Captain find a young, thin guard to climb into the hole. From inside, the guard calls out that it smells terrible. Norton orders him to keep going. The guard starts yelling that “it’s shit” and vomits loudly. Red, unable to stay quiet, bursts into guffaws. Norton sends Red to solitary for 15 days, bur in solitary, Red keeps laughing and thinking about Andy, free and traveling toward his dream.
After leaving solitary, Red hears from other prisoners what happened. The guard in the hole found a porcelain sewer pipe with a hole knocked into it and a rock-hammer abandoned nearby. Andy had entered the pipe and crawled through it into the creek where it “emptied.” He’d likely found out about the pipe and the creek by sneaking a look at Shawshank’s blueprints. Later, searchers found his Shawshank uniform about two miles from the creek. Despite major news coverage, no one came forward to say they’d seen him fleeing across the surrounding land. Red speculates Andy headed to Buxton.
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Much to Red’s delight, a defeated Norton quits three months after Andy escapes, leaving Shawshank trudging “like an old con shuffling down to the infirmary for codeine pills.” The Captain of the Guards takes over as warden. Red imagines Norton going regularly to church but wondering how Andy bested him. Red internally replies: “Some have got it, Sam. And some don’t, and never will.”
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Red speculates about how, exactly, Andy went about escaping. Again he remembers Andy’s old cellmate Normaden, who complained about the cell’s draftiness. Red thinks having a cellmate must have slowed Andy’s progress; otherwise, Andy might have escaped “before Nixon resigned.” He guesses Andy began tunneling in 1949, after he asked for the Rita Hayworth pin-up poster—Andy’s strange demeanor, which Red took for sexual “embarrassment,” was actually nervous pleasure at the thought of escape.
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Curious about Andy’s escape, Red writes to a University of Maine historian and learns Andy’s cellblock was constructed as a WPA project from 1934 to 1937, when concrete was comparatively primitive. Red guesses Andy’s interest in rocks—which suited his “patient, meticulous nature” and likely intensified in prison, to pass the years—led him to study the prison walls. Red imagines Andy etching words onto his wall, realizing it was “interestingly weak,” and buying the pin-up poster to hide his explorations. When Red procured the rock-hammer for Andy, he’d supposed a man would need centuries to burrow through a wall with it—but Andy only needed to reach the sewer pipe, and it still took him 27 years, working only at night.
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Wondering how Andy disposed of the concrete he dug from the wall, Red recalls seeing Andy in the exercise yard with sand swirling around his feet. He speculates Andy filled his pant cuffs with crushed concrete and dumped them out “cupful by cupful.” While various wardens thought Andy was helping them to protect his library, he was really doing it because he wanted to avoid a cellmate. Prior to 1950, when he started helping guards with their finances and tax-laundering for crooked wardens, he probably bribed a few guards not to search his cell too thoroughly.
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Red guesses that Andy discovered the shaft inside the prison wall in 1967, around the time he first mentioned Zihuatanejo to Red. This discovery would have made escape much more viable, but it would also have raised the stakes for Andy. Red imagines what “ghastly irony” would have occurred if Andy had actually gotten paroled—guards would have cleaned out Andy’s cell and discovered the hole, and Andy would have been thrown right back in prison.
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Pondering why Andy only escaped in 1975 if he found the shaft in 1967, Red guesses Andy proceeded carefully to avoid detection—but also, prison institutionalizes people until they “love” the restraints imposed on them. On Red’s prison work detail, he was only allowed to use the bathroom at 25 minutes past the hour—and after a while, that was the only time he wanted to use the bathroom. Andy may have delayed escape due to “that institutional syndrome.” Also, he was likely terrified of trying and failing to get free, whether because the pipe was blocked or because the key to the safe deposit box was no longer under the paperweight in Buxton—because a kid or a bird had taken it. Yet at last, Andy escaped.
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Red doesn’t know exactly what happened to Andy after his escape, but in 1975, he receives a blank postcard from McNary, Texas, a town on the border with Mexico. Red is convinced Andy passed through McNary into Mexico.
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Red says the postcard concludes his story—which he began writing when he received the postcard and is finishing in January 1976. Musing that “writing about yourself” brings up endless memories, he claims Andy’s story is his own story, because Andy is “the part of [Red] they could never lock up.” He notes some other prisoners remember Andy the way he does; they all feel glad Andy’s free yet sad he’s gone from their lives. Thinking his story’s over, Red notes he’s “glad” to have “told it” and—addressing Andy directly—asks Andy to “feel free” for him.
In 1977, Red—to his own surprise—resumes writing the story in a hotel in Portland after his parole at age 58. He considered destroying the manuscript before his release, because parolees are searched and the manuscript mentions Zihuatanejo, where he believes Andy to be hiding. Instead, he switched out the name Zihuatanejo for a coastal town in Peru and brought the manuscript out hidden in his rectum, the way Andy once smuggled money in.
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For two months after his release, Red works bagging groceries at a supermarket, disoriented by the noise and pace of life outside prison, unwillingly aroused by the presence of women, and wishing he didn’t feel the urge to ask his supervisor’s permission before using the bathroom. Red senses his “servile” demeanor revolts his young supervisor; Red wants to explain that prison turns a man into a “dog,” but he knows his supervisor won’t grasp what he means. Red feels tempted to commit some petty crime so he can go back to prison. But he remembers all the effort Andy expended to get free, and he thinks returning to prison “would be like spitting in the face of everything [Andy] had worked so hard to win back.”
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Instead, Red starts hitchhiking to Buxton, searching for a paperweight in a hayfield. On April 23rd, he finds the rock, picks it up, and discovers an envelope with his name written on it in Andy’s handwriting. Red takes the envelope back to his room and reads it. In the letter, Andy invites Red to come help with his “project” and tells him: “Remember that hope is a good thing, Red, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.” Andy has also left Red $1000 in 50-dollar bills.
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In the hotel in Portland—where Red is technically violating parole—he itemizes his belongings: the manuscript, some luggage, and all the money Andy sent minus the little Red spent buying writing paper and some cigarettes. Though Red deliberates for a moment about his course of action, he ultimately decides he has “two choices. Get busy living or get busy dying.” He writes down his intention to pack his manuscript, check out of the hotel, go to a bar, take two shots (one for himself, one for Andy), and then buy bus tickets all the way to McNary, Texas. From McNary, he plans to enter Mexico. He feels “excitement only a free man can feel,” hoping that Andy’s in Zihuatanejo, Red can reach him, and they’ll be reunited. He concludes: “I hope.”
