Free Essays,College Free Essays,Free College Essays at Anti Essays

Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying

The movie of the "Shawshank Redemption" is based on a short story by Steven King. It shows how prison life affects prisoners during their sentence in jail and after when they are released. The director concentrates mostly on the personal cost of adapting to prison life and how some convicts, once they conform, lose the ability to survive beyond the barbed wire and iron bars. As a character puts it, ‘These [prison] walls are funny. First you hate them, then you get used to them, then you start to depend on them.’ The director shows us to what extent prisoners can be made to ‘depend on them’. The two episodes are that of examples, of two different ‘paths’ prisoners can take once released from prison. One is to survive and live their life, another is to give up and end it. At one point Red, a prisoner at Shawshank, says ‘get busy living or get busy dying. This quote plays an important role in the movie because Red and Brooks, who are two important characters, get out of jail and must make the choice to either “Get busy living or get busy dying.”
When people are in jail for a long period of time, they get used to the simplest things in life. Prisoners get food, have a place to sleep, have clothes to wear, and have books to read. They adapt to the guards always telling them when to wake up or when to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner. Prisoners get so used to these things that when they get out of jail, they don’t know what to do with themselves. They have been taken care of for so many years and now they are let out on their own. Prisoners are used to a small world and then they have to go live in a big world. They have no money to live on, no place to live, nor a job to get by on. The movie offers two ways of dealing with life after prison; you can either live or die.
Brooks was an older man who had been in jail for many years that, had been the most conformed within the walls of the prison. When Brooks...