Shawshank Redemption

Introduction

Being convicted of a crime you honestly did not perform, let alone the crime being the murder of your spouse, and being put into a prison where you would be for life and parole was out of the picture. This is the start of Shawshank Redemption. Andy Dufresne must live with this in the story based back in the day in the late 1940's where Rita Hayworth was the object of desire. Shawshank is the prison in which Andy is sentenced to and must survive all of the problems of his new jail life (Ebert, 1999).

Comparison & Analysis

I had seen the movie before I had read the book in this case. The movie was over two hours long and I was expecting the book to be just as long, but to my surprise it was only one hundred and eight pages long, and the writing was not even that small. While reading the book, I found it to be snappy and clever in the writing. The movie was also clever and it followed the book closely, but did elaborate on the novel a bit more, making the movie very long.

In the novel, the structure had Red talking about Andy and the story behind him and his sentence to Shawshank. The book was Red in first person. In the beginning of the book, Red told a bit about himself and then moved on to Andy. As the story went on, Andy was basically the main character and Red was the biographer of him. In the movie though, the beginning was not about Red in the first person. In fact, Red was just another prisoner, but still had those moments where he did state his mind as the first person. The novel's structure was very descriptive of all the prisoners and the labor they had to go under. It was very thorough. In the movie, everything was very clear to understand, but the novel had some trouble getting the right things said or expressed. The novel confused me a bit when it described the murder of Andy's wife and her lover. The novel did not do a good job of expressing the time and place of everything. It flipped to the past and the present on and off at first. In the movie, it was easier to know whether it was a flashback or not because that scenes that were shown were just hints of what was going on, showing only the evidence such as the gun and alcohol. When the flashbacks of Andy's escape was shown, there were clips that were shown of when each little step Andy had to take to get out of the prison.

The novel and the movie pretty much are the same things. Of course the novel is much shorter looking than the two-hour movie. There are not too many differences in the film compared to the novel. It pretty much goes play by play according to the original novel. In the ...