This is a work worth studying, and it is also a work that expresses the deepest human nature.

Assumptions about the good and evil of human nature have long been a topic of discussion in literature.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the devastating disasters brought about by the two world wars, the man-made destruction of the living environment and the ravages of disease have made the concepts of reason, belief and morality carefully constructed by people for thousands of years disappear.

People begin to doubt human nature, feel anxious and pessimistic about their future fate and prospects.

Against this background, most of the modernist writers who have turned to express the subjective spiritual world of human beings have fallen into the quagmire of nihilism and pessimism, and the images of "human evil" have emerged in literary works one after another, making people feel that the meaning and value of human existence are facing serious challenges.

Andy's journey of redemption is full of despair and extremely heavy, in this process, what makes him not feel aggrieved in the face of injustice, does not become violent in the face of suppression, does not feel hopeless in the face of difficulties, and always maintains a calm mind and tenacious fighting spirit?

The answer is clear, that is, Andy's extraordinary rationality, which allows him to freely balance gains and losses, so that he can strip himself of hatred, transcend himself, and finally reach the other side of freedom.

The work barely focuses on how Andy digs a hole with difficulty, tenacity, and wisdom, but rather a representation of a man with a capital letter.

Andy has never lost his good humanity in that magic city that cruelly devours his body and soul, and has tenaciously completed his insistence on human nature, that is, his tenacious self-awareness and affirmation of his emotions, rights, and values as a person.

Reason made him never accept his fate, convinced him of the incompatibility of human nature, made him always have hope and imagination for freedom, and made him work tirelessly for self-redemption and the realization of true human freedom.

Stephen King's Shawshank is a place of dehumanization, where the long-term mental torture of the prison has institutionalized every prisoner. Rhett's words are thought-provoking: "When you first went to prison, you hated the walls around you, and slowly, you got used to living in them, and eventually you found that you had to rely on them to survive. ”

The story of the pigeon and the prisoner Brooke is terrifying. A prisoner kept a pigeon when he was in prison, and when he was released from prison, he took the pigeon to dangle in a corner of the sports field, and after 8 years, he was released from prison, and the day before he was released from prison, he released the pigeon that he had raised for 8 years, and the pigeon immediately flew away with a beautiful posture.

However, a week later, Andy saw the pigeon again in the corner of the playground, and the pigeon was lying there like dung, and the pigeon had been institutionalized in prison life, and the corner of the playground had become its entire living space, and after the release it was back there, and the unfed pigeon starved to death in that place.

There is also Brooke, the prisoner, who spent decades in Shawshank Prison, which has become his whole world.

In Brooke's eyes, the world outside the walls was so terrible that he didn't know how to live after he went out, and when he was released on parole, he cried as he walked with a parole document in one hand and a bus ticket in the other, and died in a poor old people's home less than a year later.

Everyone who came out of Shawshank became the walking dead, not to mention anything to keep humanity alive.

The title of the work "The Shawshank Redemption" is also symbolic.

Shawshank symbolizes darkness and evil, while the word salvation, which originated in the Old Testament book of Isaiah, symbolizes the practice of Christian thought.

It is worth considering that the characters in it do not regard "religion as the foundation of social life" as the early American immigrants did, and certainly do not engage in any religious practice.

The protagonist Andy did not wait for God's redemption for him, but relied on his persistence in good humanity to save himself, win his freedom, and achieve rebirth. In fact, with the lack of faith in Western society in the 20th century, humanism replaced theocentricity, a term that seems to have long since become less popular.

Many writers have long noted that "material money is the corrosive agent, and industrial technology is the source of dehumanization".

The salvation achieved by Andy, an "alternative" character in Stephen King's decades of painstaking and dismal management in Shawshank Prison, is by no means the salvation of ordinary Christian doctrine, and the redemption here seems to be more appropriate to be put in quotation marks, so as to express more implications, and to see the author's deep concern and thinking about many problems in current society and modern human nature.

"The Shawshank Redemption" interprets the true meaning of hope and freedom, it can be said that if Andy in the story gives up hope, he will not be free, it is not difficult to see through the plot that hope leads to action, not only the protagonist Andy, but even Red in the story also found light and hope through Andy's gift, and finally gained freedom through hope.

Although hope and freedom are two different words, they have a causal relationship in . "Hope" is the most genuine fantasy, hope, expectation, desire to achieve a certain purpose or a certain situation in the heart.

Because Andy has hope, he can make a series of redemptions to save himself.

In the story, freedom is the fulfillment of hope.

In "The Shawshank Redemption", it is difficult to draw a line between real good and evil, and the wardens and prison guards, who are symbols of justice, become the embodiment of crime, and the prisoners who commit crimes ultimately prove to be the representatives of justice.

The symbols of good and evil return to the real world from the ancient Middle Ages.

Prisoners pass the time in closed prisons, having fun with fights and perverted behaviors, and the guilty prisoners accept the fact of being imprisoned, while the innocent Andy can only be freed by extreme means.

All kinds of characters are alive and well in the real world.

At its core, "The Shawshank Redemption" is a hymn to American egocentrism.

However, it eschews the traditional model of preaching individual heroism.

The original author did not simply portray Andy's character as a lonely Anglo-Vietnamese character, and did not observe the world from Andy's perspective.

Instead, from the perspective of the second protagonist, Red, the reader is brought into Andy's world and long prison life.

Red's confession actually represents the views and attitudes of most prisoners in the prison towards real life, and the author skillfully uses this invisible hand to bring Andy's emotions and the reader's emotions closer step by step, so that the reader can feel closely connected with Andy's fate, and naturally indulge his emotions as the protagonist encounters.

Of course, Andy himself is not a hero or the embodiment of redemption, he is just a very ordinary person. Of course, this hero is still lacking, he is not a man of high morals, otherwise, he would not have stolen the warden's ill-gotten gains, and he would not have escaped from prison. If he had been perfect, Andy would not have been so distinctive, and would not have been able to attract the attention of the messenger like this. So, Andy is an alternative old American hero.