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Examples Of Andy In Shawshank Redemption

Decent Essays

An individual’s personality or persona is created through a combination of events a person would receive from society, and how the individual absorbs these events gives the bases for that individual to develop his\hers persona. In the novella, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, Stephen King uses the character Andrew Dufresne to demonstrate the influence society has on the development of a person's persona or identity. When change of social environment occurs to an individual, it is natural reaction for the individual to climb the social chain, so that they may find contentment. The first time Andy talks with Red, and Andy is still new and is faced with the drastic change in environment and the way of communication being less formal, thus making Andy look more of a snob to other inmates at Shawshank, an Red’s thoughts “Andy had a reputation for being a [snob] and a [cold fish].”(King 20). The words “cold fish” and “snob” are used to clearly describe how the character Andy is seen by others, is used by King to present the readers a starting point for which the character Andy can build up from and develop a new persona. Once an individual finds their place in the new environment, society molds the individual into a working part of the social chain. The day Andy, Red, and a couple of others were working on the top of a roof, and Andy overheard one of the guards talking about the fortune he had made, but complaining about the income taxes. Andy agrees with the guard, that

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