How Has An Individual's Life Affected By The Past In Shawshank Redemption

Improved Essays
In my opinion I believe that an individual’s past can have a significant impact on their present life. Over time we see those effected by their past leaving a tragic mark in their current day to day life. Rather it was war giving a man PDSD or individual being thrown into prison for their political opinion etc. People having their life torn apart by their past will have a hard time recovering and forgetting their past. In Shawshank Redemption a movie about a man thrown into jail for a crime he didn’t commit we can see him and those around him and seeing how their past affected their current life. The excerpt call From Prisoners of Tehran gives us a great example about how one’s life in significantly impacted by their past.
In the movie Shawshank Redemption a man named Andy was giving multiple life sentences for the murder of his lover. Weeks and months goes by as Andy began his new life in prison he began to meet people and make friends. An important friend Andy makes and a person who had his life affected by the past, is a
…show more content…
A relative of mine who fought in the Vietnam War has a symptom called Post Dramatic Stress Disorder (PDSD). This order made him hallucinate, gave him dreams about the war and gave him a hard time interacting with people. Seeing his friends die in front of him, smelling the blood of the dead corpses and seeing unbearable thing around him had made him a different person then he was in the past. This disorder shows us how even after so long the effects of war and his past fighting in the war had left an impact on his everyday life that he can’t forget.
In conclusion I believe that the past of an individual can have a significant impact upon an individual. As people go through things they cannot forget and how ones past demonstrate who they are as a person. This negative impact of an individual can have many

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    During his Nobel Peace Prize speech, “Memory, Hope, and Despair”, Elie Weisel said, “The opposite of the past is not the future but the absence of future; the opposite of the future is not the past but the absence of past. The loss of one is equivalent to the sacrifice of the other.” This quote really captures how I feel about the past; without it, one cannot have a future, which is the reason I find my memories more important than my dreams. In that same speech, Elie Weisel also said, “Without memory, our existence would be barren and opaque.”…

    • 545 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    What is it that makes the past so interesting? Maybe it’s the fact that they are well known or maybe you’re just trying to pass the class. Are we really that interested in someone’s life that someone at one point in history says it must be remember? I think that it is important that we make note of someone’s past, not only to learn from their mistakes, but to realize what they did. Looking at the life of Pat Garrett we are reminded of why someone makes history and the effects that it impacts them during their life.…

    • 1029 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the first five chapters of the novel Obasan, there was only a slight sense of negativeness, and in chapter 6 to 10, it becomes clear. There is a stronger sense of negativeness when Naomi expresses her emotions for the first time such as anger, hatred, frustration, and discomfort. Naomi reveals what her family experienced in the past, and this information certainly explains the dark, and delicate atmosphere from the previous chapters. In chapter 7, Naomi finds a parcel Aunt Emily has sent to her, and inside of the parcel, there are several packages of documents. What those documents from the parcel contain are unimaginable; they are the absolute evidence of the terrible mistreatments of the Canadian Government that Naomi’s family, and the…

    • 624 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Knowing the past and remembering your experiences is just as significant as being aware of what goes on in the present. George Santayana's quote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." represents the story Animal Farm the best. Santayana's quote basically says that if the people (the animals in this case) fail to learn from their experiences, cannot reminisce the past, or cannot point out their faults of that past event, then their mistakes are bound to recur again, which is precisely what was going on, on the Animal Farm. This quote relates to Animal Farm because the story both starts out and ends out quite the same, which was being supervised inefficiently and being mistreated. Being illiterate, uneducated, and…

    • 377 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The film Shawshank Redemption is an award-winning film by Frank Darabont in which an innocent man, Andy Dufresne, is sentence to two life sentences for the murder of his wife and her lover. Andy is sentenced to life in Shawshank State Penitentiary for after being wrongly convicted even after professing his innocence. While imprisoned Andy befriends a man everyone knows as Red who is known for being able to smuggle things into the prison. Over the years Red is able to get Andy a rock hammer as well as a large poster. Two years into his sentence Andy provides a guard with financial advice, which leads him to providing advice to multiple guards and eventually the warden himself.…

    • 1187 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    There are countless factors that shape individuals’ views of the world. One critical factor is a significant event in one’s life, which can have profound effects on that person’s outlook and viewpoint. More than anything else, particular events can linger in an individual’s thoughts and memories, and reform their feelings and attitudes. This phenomenon is observable in society and popular culture. For instance, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible highlights how single events can change an individual’s view of the world.…

    • 1031 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The Vietnam War The Vietnam war was the first war that the United States of America lost. This war was one of the bloodiest that the United States had fought since the civil war. A total of around fifty-eight thousand Americans were killed, three hundred fifty thousand were wounded, and two thousand were captured as Prisoners of War. The Vietnam War was utterly devastating for our troops and potentially for our country. Robert J.McMahon states in his book, Major Problems in the History of the Vietnam War, that the U.S. can’t “remain great if it betrays its allies and lets down its friend” (449).…

    • 2165 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    What a person does today will affect the future. If a person tries hard and works for something that they really want, or if they do not try at all then it will affect the outcome. History literally means his or her story. Stories are told to each generation to keep the memory alive and that is why history is so important, because otherwise the past would be unknown and people would not know the kind of hurt their families went through to be free, or the things that their ancestors did to make sure that their families in the future would get what they need. This is how the Underground Railroad is; it is stories of the hurt and tortured people that could just not take the pain any more so they took a stand, whether it meant losing their life…

    • 2022 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    With a sad song playing in the background, viewers watch as a seemingly sad and distraught man sits in his vehicle with a pistol and a bottle of bourbon. Anticipation slowly consuming the viewer as they await to see what will happen next. Is the guy going to kill himself? The guy drunkenly exits his vehicle with bullets dropping from his lap and hitting the ground. He stands in front of a well-lit house.…

    • 485 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    One might ask: How many people this day and age are faced with their horrific past negatively affecting their future? This answer can be found in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. After two strange men break out of prison, they plot to murder an innocent family. Capote uses background information from the killer's, the family that was murdered, and people who were close to the family throughout the story to show how their past affected their future actions. Capote not only connects with the characters background, but he also connects with their emotions and how they were affected after the murder, and he sets a dark and repentant tone.…

    • 1074 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Essay On PTSD In Veterans

    • 1362 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Despite this relatively recent acceptance by the psychiatric community, the notion of traumatic stress has been discussed in the context of military service as far back as the writings of the Ancient Greeks (Shay, 2002). PTSD is still in the process of becoming more appropriately diagnosed and discussed as a serious problem among all military personnel and veterans. The term “post-traumatic sress disorder” was coined in the late 1970’s after the Vietnam War. Another form of PTSD that is frequently experienced by veterans is known as “survivals guilt” (Smith, 2015). This occurs when a veteran returns from active duty and feels guilty that that they had survived while others did…

    • 1362 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    For starters, personality traits change over time, as do one’s opinions and characteristics. As personality changes, so would actions taken by the individual. Thus, memories provide a sort of ‘track record’ of one’s personality and values at that time. Additionally, actions taken by an individual are largely contingent upon mood; someone who is otherwise kind, but is in a bad mood one day, may make a rude remark that is not representative of their traits. Even if someone does not have a memory of something they did, at one point they did, and it is the constant overlap between memories and the causal reaction of actions to create these memories that matters.…

    • 1508 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In McCammon’s novel, Boy’s Life, Cory Mackenson shows great development in this aspect, displaying his ability to let go of the many things that happened to him in his childhood. This ability was necessary for Cory, such as the death of his dog Rebel and a local murder, because if he was not able to let go he would have been burdened with the past. Cory recalled the good memories from his life in Zephyr but did not focus of the bad, moving on to making new memories in his older years. It is impossible for one to move forward in life while holding onto past events; only when one lets go of these events do they…

    • 868 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    One example is when Andy locks himself in a room and broadcasts opera music through out the prison. All the inmates stop to listen, mesmerized by the voice of the woman opera singer. Some of the men had not heard a woman’s voice for over a decade, and to hear one suddenly catches their attention, making the men feel free, giving them hope. Andy not only gives his friends and fellow inmates a sense of the hope that was neglected, but uses their hope to build his own. The opera music signifies freedom and hope so that the entire prison could feel the music.…

    • 615 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    People learn a great deal from their experiences as they can change their entire outlook and attitude towards life as well as their communication with others. Perception directly effects communication and explains how the same message can be interpreted differently by people. The relationships we have with people through communication enable us to have similar perceptions of the world, however no two people can see the world in exactly the same way because of differences in their fields of experience. There are experiences that we share together such as, love, the instinct to survive, the desire for health, knowledge and happiness but each individual has events in life that make them experience these things differently. Perception is affected…

    • 1596 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays