You might be wondering, 'But why Rita Hayworth?' Good question. And for a while just that was enough to make me feel free. He strolled off, as if he was a free man who had just made another free man a proposition. He keeps that secret light in his soul, and he helps the other cons feel it too: Yet, he finds a way to keep it all from getting to him. He's chased around by rapists, forced to do free tax work for the guards and generally subjected to the worst kind of treatment imaginable. He's chucked in jail for a crime he didn't commit. More to the point, the word 'redemption' probably refers to the way Andy redeems this injustice that has happened to him. Most good books have a hook to get us started and this one puts it right there in the title. What's a Shawshank? Do people get redeemed there? Does it do the redeeming? How? And how does an old-time pin-up girl figure into it? They're good questions, good enough perhaps to make us open the book and read it to find out the answers. King wants you to ask some questions to lead you into the narrative. Even so, it's a weird collection of words-weird enough for the movie to cut a few words from its title-and it doesn't make a lot of sense until you read the book. Put them all together and you have the book's full title: Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.The title refers to Andy's escape, as well as a shout out to one of the ways he makes life bearable in prison.

Shawshank: a make-believe prison in Maine.Rita Hayworth: movie star and incredible hottie of yesteryear.Thanks to its movie adaptation, most of us know this story by its shortened title, The Shawshank Redemption, but the book actually has three parts to its title:

The shawshank redemption novel