There is a tale of stone and iron, and of the spirit that will not yield, that meets the reader who approaches The Shawshank Redemption, for here is a work that does not merely please but gives the heart knowledge of what patience may accomplish against the hardest of trials. Few pictures of our age have gained so lasting a regard, and none, I think, more justly.
Of Walls and What They Cannot Hold
The tale concerns a gentleman of quiet bearing, condemned though innocent, sent to a fortress of stone and iron where the days extend into years with a cruelty most heavy and severe. The Shawshank Redemption does not hasten its telling; it remains, as a patient man remains, upon the small insults and the small acts of goodness that compose a life spent in confinement.
What strikes the mind with wonder is how thoroughly the walls themselves become a character — malevolent, watchful, indifferent to the distress they contain. Yet The Shawshank Redemption declares, with a spirit both melancholy and firm, that no wall however thick can wholly confine the soul of a man who will not surrender to despair.
The Voice That Tells the Tale
The method of an aged prisoner relating, in a voice worn and wise, the passage of his companion through this dreadful institution, lends the whole a communion rare among such grim tales. One feels addressed directly, as by a fellow companion at some midnight fire, telling matters too heavy for the light of day.
This voice carries the picture forward with such tenderness that even its most dreadful passages — and there are passages here of true dread, of cruelty and corruption among those set to guard rather than give pain — never turn into mere spectacle of suffering. There is always, beneath the sorrow, a current of steady tenderness.
A Design of Patient Skill
Without making known the particulars of its most extraordinary turn, I may say that The Shawshank Redemption meets patience with patience, as surely as it shows patience so met. The scheme of its telling is made with the exact skill of a man who has all the time in the world and nothing but his mind to occupy it — which is to say, precisely the skill of its innocent hero.
When the design at last shows itself, it does so not with cheap noise but with the gradual, sure satisfaction of a lock finally yielding to the correct key. Few tales of confinement have joined their meaning so exactly to their plan.
Pecuniary Matters and Lasting Regard
It is worth remarking, as a curiosity, that The Shawshank Redemption found but slight favor at the public purse upon its first showing — a poor recompense for so rich a work, proving once more that the immediate judgment of the many and the considered verdict of later ages are seldom the same creature. Time, that most honest of critics, has since rendered its own judgment, and rendered it plainly in favor of this work.
Seen again, at any distance of years, it loses nothing of its power. If anything, better acquaintance gives more weight to both the sorrow and the joy, for one knows precisely where the light will finally break through — and remains for it still with held breath.
A Closing Word
I do not employ the word extraordinary without cause, yet I can find no lesser term for The Shawshank Redemption. It is a tale of patience, of quiet conspiracy against despair, and of the steady, strange refusal of the human spirit to be broken. Few works of its kind have won so thoroughly the regard they receive, and few still deserve it more.