Identity encapsulates characteristics. Every man, we know, has a beating heart and thinking brain. The details, or quality, of these characteristics is specific to individual representations of an identity. All men have brains, but the brains of all men are not identical. Thus, all men have character, but the character of all men is individual.
Heraclitus once penned the famous, "Character is destiny". I will take this as a presupposition which simply predicts that cause-effect relationships determine "destiny," or at least those things which happen to an individual, the combination of things they can control and things they cannot. I will also take character to be a combination of virtues, contextualized to each individual. I will take identity to thus relate to the form of character--virtuous, unvirtuous, these will constitute the identity of the individual for my purpose here.
Ayn Rand used Aristotle's Law of Identity to build a foundation for rational self-interest. Her minor heroes (Francisco, Rearden, Dagny) exemplify this trait, but only her major heroes (Roark, Galt) display a near perfection of her Objectivism. While the former characters were at times plagued with personal flaws, doubts, emotions, fears...the latter were Rand's "Romantic Realism"--ideal characters projected onto real life situations. Rand's work has received criticism for its attempt to purvey her philosophy due to her inability to make her major heroes human, in many respects. Much like the Vulcan Spock, Galt and Roark are perfect Stoics, with Reason as their only driving force and guiding principle. These never display humanity--self-doubt, self-image issues, the need for outside approval, largely emotion in general. Although in Rand's work, the minor hero characters redeemed themselves, with the assistance of the major characters, who needed no redemption, Andy Dufresne is not depicted as a robot. He is also not perfect, or else there would be no Shawshank Redemption.
Andy was redeemed. Andy's redemption was not being freed from wrongful conviction, after all, he escaped and his name was never cleared.
In the vein of my earlier post on Andy's Stoicism, I want to argue that Andy was redeemed from the loss of his integrity. As he admitted, it took coming to prison to make him a dishonest man. He had never engaged in fraud or falsehood as a banker, but after wrongful imprisonment willingly participated in the Warden's corruption. Read the post for more detail.
The interesting thing is that Andy redeemed himself. No one else could. No one else would. Unlike Rand's minor heroes, who needed Galt/Roark (an archetype of a Savior), and unlike the uncorrupted Savior-figures of Roark and Galt, Andy both was corrupted and redeemed himself.
This is a beautiful component of the story, something that runs deep and deserves serious contemplation. King takes the unrealistic Randian hero, corrupts it, and gives it the power to redeem itself. Andy, like Spock, shows emotion and feels pain, but by the force of his will follows virtue to its logical conclusion. While Galt's identity is "The Guiltless Man", Andy's is not.
Andy feels guilt, but is compelled, of his own accord, to acheive the destiny his character has determined: redemption. Andy is "The Self-Redeeming Man". This is his character, his identity, and his destiny.
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Technorati tags: Philosophy, Andy Dufresne, Shawshank, Identity
