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Review of Shawshank Redemption
Why would we classify Andy as a tragic hero?
Andy is a tragic hero because he was a man who had everything but experienced a great reversal of fortune due to one of his flaws. He had a successful career and a great life ahead of him. Unfortunately, he lost everything when he was convicted of murdering his wife and her lover, based on strong circumstantial evidence.
What was his flaw and how did it cause his fall from grace?
Andy was too innocent(no pun intended). He didn’t know what the world was really like and he never expected his wife to be cheating on him. He could not face the cruel fact that his wife was cheating on him and in his drunken state, he even contemplated killing the adulterous couple. Although he didn’t kill his wife in the end, he was still convicted of murder due to the “evidence” that he left behind near the murder scene and he was sent to jail with a life sentence for something that he didn’t do.
What lessons did he learn from his mistakes?
Andy learnt that if he wanted to survive in this cruel world, he had to be cruel himself.
How did he change and how did he change others?
He knew that he had to resort to trickery and schemes if he wanted to survive or even escape from the prison. He managed to gain the trust and protection of the prison guards so that other people in the prison would not be able to hurt him. He even laundered money for the prison warden under a false identity, in exchange for allowing him to keep his private cell and to continue maintaining the library.
Andy also convinced his newly made friends in the prison that there was always hope that they could one day leave the prison although most of them believed that it was hopeless. When Andy finally managed to escape from the prison, they finally realised that there really is hope after all.
