Artistic Perspective Final

Art is something that everyone sees everyday but yet no one pays much attention to it. I have gotten a lot ideas about the meaning of life from reading both religious and philosophical texts. Art is an entertainment that can both benefit and brainwash the person who both uses it and creates it. As I look back, it is actually art, which has affected my sense of the meaning of life the most. Using the story Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption as my primary text I am going to analyze the power art has and it’s affect on my sense of the meaning of life.
In shawshank redemption, man named Andy, who was accused of murdering his wife and her golf instructor due to jealousy, and was sentenced to jail escape around 30 years later. The story was told from the perspective of a man named Red, a fellow prisoner of Andy who had become friends with Andy over their years together in jail.Throughout the stories entirety, I was able to recognize that Andy’s meaning of life was taking advantage of his situation, therefore changing it from a horrible situation to one he could at least deal with. Life in jail is a far cry from that of the one outside of it. In jail, your life is not control by you but instead you are treated like a puppet waiting for someone to begin to move you. The characters in the story begin to care more about the small aspects of their past lives. One of the minor aspects of life that is taken with great strides in the story is picking of rocks. Rocks are a reoccurring theme in the story, which is seen many times throughout the story. Andy collects rocks from the yard during their time out there. He uses an object called a rock-hammer, which he got from Red, to shape and polish each rock. Red does not understand why Andy spends his time acting like a child playing with rocks until one day Andy shows him the final product. “There were two pieces of quartz in that box, both of them carefully polished. They have been chipped into driftwood shapes. There were little sparkles of iron pyrites in them like flecks of gold…How much work went into creating those two pieces?” The rocks stimulated a sense of hope into the prisoner. The rock was just a metaphor for the prisoner’s actual lives. Life is hard, just like a rock pick up from the ground. If you take to take care of it and you do not become impatient, it can become something very meaningful and worthwhile.
In the story Andy is portray as the absurd hero. Andy is portrayed to be an absurd hero in that although he is placed into a situation, which threatens to pull him down into despair, he is still able to look beyond the situation and see its benefits although there are few. “He wants to be free and own a hotel in Mexico, something many prisoners would think was something that only happens in dreams. It is already difficult enough trying to live each day without getting beaten, and another prisoner would have probably been satisfied if given the status Andy has in prison. The fact that Andy could still act with good intentions when he had been abused and mistreated is also absurd. What had been most absurd was Andy's persistency in coming through with an escape plan, which might not even have worked. He decided to try to dig through a 10 feet thick wall in his cell with a rock hammer, and although he only ended up digging through half of it, it took him twenty-seven years. That in it, with the many risks that come with it, is absurd, yet Andy would not have been able to escape to Mexico without having done so. This links back to existentialism, and how the choices you make might be absurd yet you do it anyway. The choice is still there. Maybe part of the Absurd in the story comes from Andy having been placed into a prison. The two seem to contradict; Andy, having had so much promise and success, was locked into an environment which would end life as people know it, and take their youth along.”(Lisa Blog) After looking at Shawshank Redemption and thinking about how it relates to the meaning of life my thoughts on the meaning of life continue to change more and more. Art is a major factor in everyone’s life, whether it being good or bad. Life is found throughout our lives, from the day we are born to the day we die, art will always be there.