In Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, stories produce reality. Memories are stories people tell about the past, hopes are stories people tell about the future, and people act based on their memories and hopes—so stories have great power. The novella itself is a story the narrator, Red, tells about a man he met in prison, Andy Dufresne. Andy was convicted for two murders he didn’t commit because the prosecution was able to tell a more convincing story than Andy himself. Due to Andy’s self-contained demeanor, the prosecution spins a compelling yarn that portrays Andy as a cold-blooded, premeditated murderer. Andy testifies he bought a gun prior to the murders because he was suicidal and can’t account for all his actions the night of the murders because he was drinking; though Andy is likely telling the truth, the jurors don’t believe him because he hasn’t told a plausible story. Moreover, a clerk testifies that Andy bought dishtowels from him, which were later found at the crime scene. Andy believes that the clerk genuinely believes this recollection is the truth, given that memory is, per Andy, “such a goddam subjective thing” and the prosecution’s story about Andy is so compelling.
Once in prison, however, Andy becomes a “legend” that inspires hope in other prisoners due to his desire for self-determination and freedom. Prisoners tell and retell stories about Andy refusing to perform oral sex on a prison rapist, convincing a correctional officer to buy beers for a gang of prisoners tarring a roof, and—eventually—escaping through a hidden hole in his cell wall. Though Red fears he won’t survive in the outside world after parole and considers committing another crime just to be re-incarcerated, the story he’s told about Andy inspires him to seize his freedom and seek out Andy in Mexico. Thus, the novella illustrates that stories not only entertain people but shape their memories, hopes, and behavior—and, thus, their reality.
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Stories, Memory, and Hope Quotes in Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption
Have I rehabilitated myself, you ask? I don’t even know what that word means, at least as far as prisons and corrections go. I think it’s a politician’s word. It may have some other meaning, and it may be that I will have a chance to find out, but that is the future . . . something cons teach themselves not to think about.
It was that last fact that militated more against Andy than any of the others. The DA with the political aspirations made a great deal of it in his opening statement and his closing summation. Andrew Dufresne, he said, was not a wronged husband seeking a hot-blooded revenge against his cheating wife; that, the DA said, could be understood, if not condoned. But this revenge had been of a much colder type. Consider! the DA thundered at the jury. Four and four! Not six shots, but eight! He had fired the gun empty . . . and then stopped to reload so he could shoot each of them again!
“I think it’s at least possible that he convinced himself. It was the limelight. Reporters asking him questions, his picture in the papers . . . all topped, of course, by his star turn in court. I’m not saying that he deliberately falsified his story, or perjured himself. I think it’s possible that he could have passed a lie detector test with flying colors, or sworn on his mother’s sacred name that I bought those dishtowels. But still . . . memory is such a goddam subjective thing.”
I don’t have to listen to rumors about a man when I can judge him for myself.
Because of his small size and fair good looks (and maybe also because of that very quality of self-possession I had admired), the sisters were after Andy from the day he walked in. If this was some kind of fairy story, I’d tell you that Andy fought the good fight until they left him alone. I wish I could say that, but I can’t. Prison is no fairy-tale world.
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.
I have seen some screws that I thought were almost saintly, and I think I know why that happens—they are able to see the difference between their own lives, poor and struggling as they might be, and the lives of the men they are paid by the State to watch over. These guards are able to formulate a comparison concerning pain. Others can’t, or won’t.
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.
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.
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.
“You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific?”
I told him I didn’t.
“They say it has no memory. And that’s where I want to finish out my life, Red. In a warm place that has no memory.”
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.
