Avery Sherrer- Shawshank POV

When seeing any novel’s film adaptation for the first time, the most obvious adjustment that has to be made by a viewer is getting used to new representations of characters that had strong, and sometime very different, physical characteristics in the mind of a reader. As for Stephen King’s Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, when I first saw Morgan Freeman as Red, I was not convinced that I’d be able to ignore the fact that this was Morgan Freeman, and instead see him as this character that I had imagined from the novel’s description. Other characters, like Andy for example, were depicted slightly differently from the novel’s description but it wasn’t, for me, as much of a throw-off. Pressing past character representations, Red was positioned very differently in the film versus the novel.

Red’s involvement with the action of the story, in the film, stemmed from serving as witness to many conflicts and conversations between other characters, from becoming Andy’s assistant when doing the guards’ taxes to seeing the warden and head guard repeatedly beat multiple inmates. In the novel, Red was the guy who could essentially ‘get anything’ whether it’s cigarettes or information, while in the movie he was the guy who just eavesdropped on all the action. This portrayal was too much of a change for me to look past. It may not affect Red’s credibility, as he was still present when the actions that he speaks about occurred, but his position as an ‘extra’ in many scenes made me not see Red as a man with a story of his own. At the very best, Red was told stories of actions he missed, like the warden approaching Andy for financial advice, at the lunch table simply as one of Andy’s friends.

Although Red, as a character, was overlooked in the film, he still functioned as narrator for many scenes. As narrator, Red made the audience know how to feel about particular scenes by placing his own values and views on each action. Because Red is familiar with the politics of prison life, he is trusted as a credible 1^st person perspective. But in my opinion, if the filmmakers are going to deviate from the way Red narrates from novel to movie, they may as well just cut out the middle man and make Andy narrate his own story, with Red just evaluating action from the perspective of a fellow inmate. Since Red’s 1^st person narration was so strong in the novel, his half narrator-half bystander position in the film was weak to me. Shawshank Redemption was a great movie as a stand alone, but some of the differences in point of view and narration really altered the way I not only viewed Red, but also how I evaluated the story being told.