Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption

by

Stephen King

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Institutionalization vs. Freedom Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Institutionalization vs. Freedom  Theme Icon
Stories, Memory, and Hope Theme Icon
Gender Stereotypes, Sex, and Violence Theme Icon
Corruption, Purity, and Accommodation Theme Icon
Justice and Rehabilitation Theme Icon
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  Theme Icon

Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption shows how the prison environment can steal two kinds of freedom: it can steal prisoners’ external freedom by controlling every aspect of their environment, and it can steal their internal freedom by teaching them to tolerate or even desire being controlled. Indeed, it suggests that only by protecting their internal freedom can prisoners keep their dignity and thrive after leaving prison. The novella’s narrator, Red, is nominally telling the story of Andy Dufresne, a wrongly convicted man whose strong instinct toward freedom and self-determination Red admires. Andy displays this instinct from the beginning of his incarceration. Soon after he enters Shawshank prison, a group of rapists targets him. Andy cannot fight the group off by himself, so they violate his external freedom by repeatedly gang-raping him. Yet Andy demonstrates his internal freedom by resisting every assault—communicating that he does not consent and is not resigned to the situation. After decades in prison, Andy escapes through a hole in his cell wall he has been digging for years and hiding behind various pin-up posters. Andy’s escape represents how his internal freedom—his desire for self-determination and refusal to submit to control—eventually secures his external freedom.

Though Red admires Andy, he claims to be Andy’s opposite, an “institutional man” acclimated to prison. For example, after decades of working a prison job where he’s only allowed to use the restroom at 25 minutes past the hour, Red only feels the need to use the restroom at that exact time. Though at one point, before Andy’s escape, Andy suggests to Red that they should go into business together after prison, Red says he could never survive in the outside world. Indeed, when Red is paroled after 38 years in Shawshank, he considers committing a petty crime so he can go back. Yet ultimately, Andy’s example inspires Red to protect both his external and his internal freedom: rather than going back to prison, Red decides to break parole and go find Andy, who by then is living under a fake identity in Mexico. By ending with “institutional man” Red seizing his freedom, the novella suggests that institutionalization is a powerful force, but that the human instinct for freedom, even if it can be repressed, cannot be entirely destroyed.

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Institutionalization vs. Freedom ThemeTracker

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Institutionalization vs. Freedom Quotes in Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption

Below you will find the important quotes in Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption related to the theme of Institutionalization vs. Freedom .
Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption Quotes

There’s a guy like me in every state and federal prison in America, I guess—I’m the guy who can get it for you.

Related Characters: Red/The Narrator (speaker), Andy Dufresne
Page Number: 1
Explanation and Analysis:

I don’t have to listen to rumors about a man when I can judge him for myself.

Related Characters: Red/The Narrator (speaker), Andy Dufresne
Page Number: 16
Explanation and Analysis:

It was a silly idea, and yet . . . seeing that little piece of quartz had given my heart a funny tweak. I don’t know exactly why; just an association with the outside world, I suppose. You didn’t think of such things in terms of the yard. Quartz was something you picked out of a small, quick-running stream.

Related Characters: Red/The Narrator (speaker), Andy Dufresne
Related Symbols: Rocks, Crystals, and Concrete
Page Number: 18
Explanation and Analysis:

I glanced into his cell and saw Rita over his bunk in all her swimsuited glory, one hand behind her head, her eyes half-closed, those soft, satiny lips parted. It was over his bunk where he could look at her nights, after lights-out, in the glow of the arc sodiums in the exercise yard.

But in the bright morning sunlight, there were dark slashes across her face—the shadow of the bars on his single slit window.

Related Characters: Red/The Narrator (speaker), Andy Dufresne
Related Symbols: Pin-Up Posters
Page Number: 29
Explanation and Analysis:

You may also have gotten the idea that I’m describing someone who’s more legend than man, and I would have to agree that there’s some truth to that. To us long-timers who knew Andy over a space of years, there was an element of fantasy to him, a sense, almost, of myth-magic, if you get what I mean. That story I passed on about Andy refusing to give Bogs Diamond a head-job is part of that myth, and how he kept on fighting the sisters is part of it, and how he got the library job is part of it, too.

Related Characters: Red/The Narrator (speaker), Andy Dufresne, Bogs Diamond, Byron Hadley
Page Number: 29 - 30
Explanation and Analysis:

How much work went into creating those two pieces? Hours and hours after lights-out, I knew that. First the chipping and shaping, and then the almost endless polishing and finishing with those rock-blankets. Looking at them, I felt the warmth that any man or woman feels when he or she is looking at something pretty, something that has been worked and made—that’s the thing that really separates us from the animals, I think—and I felt something else, too. A sense of awe for the man’s brute persistence.

Related Characters: Red/The Narrator (speaker), Andy Dufresne
Related Symbols: Rocks, Crystals, and Concrete
Page Number: 30 - 31
Explanation and Analysis:

So yeah—if you asked me to give you a flat-out answer to the question of whether I’m trying to tell you about a man or a legend that got made up around the man, like a pearl around a little piece of grit—I’d have to say that the answer lies somewhere in between. All I know for sure is that Andy Dufresne wasn’t much like me or anyone else I ever knew since I came inside.

Related Characters: Red/The Narrator (speaker), Andy Dufresne, Byron Hadley
Page Number: 40 - 41
Explanation and Analysis:

He discovered a hunger for information on such small hobbies as soap-carving, woodworking, sleight of hand, and card solitaire. He got all the books he could on such subjects. And those two jailhouse staples, Erie [sic] Stanley Gardner and Louis L’Amour. Cons never seem to get enough of the courtroom or the open range.

Related Characters: Red/The Narrator (speaker), Andy Dufresne
Related Symbols: Rocks, Crystals, and Concrete
Page Number: 42 - 43
Explanation and Analysis:

“Because guys like us, Red, we know there’s a third choice. An alternative to staying simon-pure or bathing in the filth and the slime. It’s the alternative that grown-ups all over the world pick. You balance off your walk through the hog-wallow against what it gains you. You choose the lesser of two evils and try to keep your good intentions in front of you.”

Related Characters: Andy Dufresne (speaker), Red/The Narrator
Page Number: 47
Explanation and Analysis:

He said it was as if Tommy had produced a key which fit a cage in the back of his mind, a cage like his own cell. Only instead of holding a man, that cage held a tiger, and that tiger’s name was Hope. Williams had produced the key that unlocked the cage and the tiger was out, willy-nilly, to roam his brain.

Related Characters: Red/The Narrator (speaker), Andy Dufresne, Samuel Norton, Tommy Williams
Page Number: 56
Explanation and Analysis:

I’ve still got them, and I take them down every so often and think about what a man can do, if he has time enough and the will to use it, a drop at a time.

Related Characters: Red/The Narrator (speaker), Andy Dufresne, Samuel Norton
Related Symbols: Rocks, Crystals, and Concrete
Page Number: 70
Explanation and Analysis:

“I couldn’t get along on the outside. I’m what they call an institutional man now. In here I’m the man who can get it for you, yeah. But out there, anyone can get it for you. Out there, if you want posters or rock-hammers or one particular record or a boat-in-a-bottle model kit, you can use the fucking Yellow Pages. In here, I’m the fucking Yellow Pages. I wouldn’t know how to begin. Or where.”

Related Characters: Red/The Narrator (speaker), Andy Dufresne
Page Number: 78
Explanation and Analysis:

Well, friends and neighbors, I was the one who went. Straight down to solitary, and there I stayed for fifteen days. A long shot. But every now and then I’d think about poor old not-too-bright Rory Tremont bellowing oh shit it’s shit, and then I’d think about Andy Dufresne heading south in his own car, dressed in a nice suit, and I’d just have to laugh. I did that fifteen days in solitary practically standing on my head. Maybe because half of me was with Andy Dufresne, Andy Dufresne who had waded in shit and came out clean on the other side, Andy Dufresne, headed for the Pacific.

Related Characters: Red/The Narrator (speaker), Andy Dufresne, Samuel Norton
Page Number: 90
Explanation and Analysis:

Well, you weren’t writing about yourself, I hear someone in the peanut-gallery saying. You were writing about Andy Dufresne. You’re nothing but a minor character in your own story. But you know, that’s just not so. It’s all about me, every damned word of it. Andy was the part of me they could never lock up, the part of me that will rejoice when the gates finally open for me and I walk out in my cheap suit with my twenty dollars of mad-money in my pocket. That part of me will rejoice no matter how old and broken and scared the rest of me is. I guess it’s just that Andy had more of that part than me, and used it better.

Related Characters: Red/The Narrator (speaker), Andy Dufresne
Page Number: 103
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Red/The Narrator (speaker), Andy Dufresne
Page Number: 110
Explanation and Analysis: