A Separate World

In the book Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption written by Stephen King, Andy Dufresne becomes wrongly imprisoned in Shawshank State Prison for the murder of his wife and her lover. Andy becomes engulfed in the prison life as he makes friends. As the book, as well as the movie, transpire you see Andy becoming one of the prisoners. The movie describes it perfectly when Andy says: “On the outside, I was an honest man, straight as an arrow. I had to come to prison to be a crook.” Andy and the other inmates are all locked up metaphorically as well as literally, hiding from themselves. Shawshank uses the isolation to submerge their prisoners to be unable to function past the prison walls.

When Andy Dufresne came through the gates of Shawshank, he was a man that kept to him self, “What was wrong with him he kept bottled up inside. If he ever had a dark night of the soul, as some writer or other has called it, you would never know” (9). But when Andy started to make friends the prison life started to get easier. The burden of being isolated and imprisoned eventually made Andy a prisoner that was secluded from the real world. Just like Andy, the rest of the prisoners that have been there for a long time also are shielded from reality outside of the prison walls. Just like in the movie when Brooks gets out of prison on parole, he cannot handle the outside world because he is so use to the prison. He gets stationed at an institute that gives him a job and he was free to do whatever he wants, but he still thinks about the prison life. The prison seems to mold the prisoners into their own creations that are isolated from the rest of the humanity. Brooks for instance could not grasp reality and only wanted to either go back to prison or ki...

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...mething was missing in his life, almost as if he had a hole in it that needs filling. The prisoners also have something missing from their lives, which is why they ended up where they did. Jack Gantos problem is that he does not know what that filler is:

I sat down on the dock. The river smelled like something dead. The sky was gray. I sat there and cried. I felt sad, and I hated myself for it. I felt beaten, and I hated myself for that. I didn't have one friend. I couldn't write one word. I was just waiting for the day to arrive when my entire life would pivot. And I was sure things were not going to pivot my way. (Gantos 137)

The prisoners’ fillers are that of being accepted. They were never accepted as they wanted to be in the real world, but in prison they all have a common qualities. They are accepted in the prison and that becomes their real life and filler.