Shawshank Redemption Fear Analysis

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Fear is the primary catalyst in the lives of humanity. Biologically engrained into the psyche of man, society has been perpetually instructed to fear certain objects and cower before their terrible might. The people who negate this fear become enlightened in the physical world and are no longer burdened by fear. Promulgating the necessity for personal transcendence, Mark Twain correctly asserts the remedial insignificance of the fear of death and supplants the overabundant virility of living life without the constraints of fear. Decimating the fearful cowardice of death, Twain denounces societally crippling stigma of fear, superimposing the transcendent betterment of existential living. Twain makes the interesting proclamation that the fear …show more content…
Derived from the innate human existential will, fruitful living grants society validation for their brief existence. Essentially simplifying the human obligation to actually living life, gratification comes to those who actually live their life. Perfectly embodying this notion, Stephen King’s riveting novella The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne is serving a life sentence, wrongfully accused for killing his wife and his wife's lover. Condemned to a life in which gratification is negated, he and his “crew” must find ways to receive the validation for the positive living they do within the confines of Shawshank. When discussing his life sentence with Red, Andy states “Get busy living, or get busy dying.” Perfectly summating Twain’s ideology's on existential living in the face of fear, Andy says that life is for the living, that the fear of death or the fear of life in prison cannot negate him his existential obligation to a life fully lived. Andy embraces the possibility of death and channels his inevitable, impending death and reworks it in the face of adversity. In a similar, personal fashion, my grandfather recently passed away. A man who literally lived life to the fullest, and to his very last day, he always told us, ”Life is for the living.” Inculcating the existential obligation that we have to ourselves, he instructed us not to cower of life and death. Rather, we were to do everything and anything that would bring us joy and validation in living. On his deathbed, Grandpa Joe was still joking about what he had done as a child in the 1950’s, getting into trouble, but living his life not in the face of fear, but triumphantly above fear, above even
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