![]() These are familiar themes in American literature and central to Huckleberry Finn, but a much more volatile theme, equally rooted in American myth, is that of the possibility of interracial friendship, figured most frequently in a bond between a young white man and an older, sympathetic black companion. Such extraordinary popularity for an adaptation of a successful but relatively unnoticed book might (and does, I will argue) attest to the film’s ability to tap more effectively those “roots of myth buried in our mind.” It does so, largely though not exclusively, through the fortuitous casting of Morgan Freeman to play the character of Red, thereby recasting King’s story within the powerful tradition of the biracial escape narrative, reaching back to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.ģThe film is about hope and the quest for freedom it is about the resilience of the human spirit and its capacity ultimately to triumph over the oppressive forces of a cruel world. Although it was not well received by reviewers and fared only moderately at the box office, The Shawshank Redemption’s sustained popularity through video sales and rentals is reflected in its top position on the Internet Movie Database’s user-generated top-250 list, edging out The Godfather and comfortably ahead of everything else. In suggesting such an affiliation between King and Twain, Atchity suggests that we consider King’s work as part of that mythopoeic tradition within which, according to critical tradition, Twain stands as the father and the archetype.ĢIronically, Atchity may have been less insightful regarding King’s original work than prescient in foreseeing the transformation of one of those novellas, “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” by writer/director Frank Darabont into The Shawshank Redemption, one of the most popular films of the twentieth century. According to Hemingway, “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn” (22). ![]() Shelley Fisher Fishkin calls Huck “the representative American” and the novel “the exemplary great American book” (Arac 184). At the pinnacle of Twain’s work is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), which Lionel Trilling describes as “not less than definitive in American literature” (115-6). ![]() Mencken echoes the sentiments of some of the most influential literary critics of the twentieth century when he calls Twain the “true father of our national literature, the first genuinely American author” (Foerstal 190). King’s stories tap the roots of myth buried in all our minds.” To approach Mark Twain, it is suggested, is to approach something truly universal or at least something quintessentially American. 1In a Los Angeles Times review of Stephen King’s tetralogy of novellas, Different Seasons (1982), Kenneth Atchity offers what has become almost a cliché of high praise: “To find the secret of his success, you have to compare King to Twain….
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