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INTRODUCTION
This chapter consists of five sections. The first section is the Background of the Study, which covers reasons of choosing the novel and the topic. The
second section talks about the Objectives of the Study to answer the problem formulation. The third one concerns with Problem Formulation, which gives
general description of the problem that will be analysed in this study. The fourth one describes the benefits of the study. And the last part, Definition of Term, talks
about the terms used in this study.
A. Background of the Study
Fiction is a work that is created by a person called an author. Usually an author or writer writes a fiction based on his or somebody else’s experience. In
the process of making the novel, the author is influenced by the intellectual and emotional sides of his life, or his outer world. Koesnosoebroto states that life
experiences which influences the writer is anything outside and inside himself which are; people, nature, man-made objects, other people ideas, knowledge and
also his feelings and intellectual activities 10. Literary works give more than pleasure and enjoyment for readers.
Reading literary work can enrich our knowledge or understanding of ourselves and our lives Little 1. Literature is a reflection and imitation of human life.
Inside the literary works lies something that the readers or people have to realize. It is used by the author to send some messages to the readers, it can be a criticism
or protest against something. The message can also teach the readers or people about morality. Most of the literary works bring a story about human life,
including its problems. There are some problems typically found in literary works, such as social problems and personal problems.
Readers of a novel may get values after reading the novel since it is a reflection of life. The reader can get such a deeper understanding on the
background of the novel, which is the character’s attitude toward any idea that is believed and practised the story. The characters in a novel may not actual human
beings; they are created to be close to actual human beings or in other words, they are drawn from life so that these characters are understandable for the readers.
Through this study the researcher is going to discuss a character’s struggle for being unfairly treated by other characters in a novel. A novel is a kind of
fiction. A fiction is a story about characters and work of imagination. According to Koesnosoebroto, prose fiction is an imaginative literature that is not meant to
be judged by the usual standards of truth and falsity 9. I chose one of the novellas from Different Seasons novel written by
Stephen King, entitled Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. This novella is very interesting in three ways. First is about the author, Stephen Edwin King.
He was born in Portland, Maine in 1947, the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. Stephen made his first professional short story tale “The
Glass Floor” to Starling Mystery Stories in 1967. Stephen King is known as a horror writer. But here, he wrote a story about friendship and people struggle. The
second is about the story of Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. The
story begins in 1948 when Andy Dufresne arrives at Shawshank prison. In contrast, he is not a hardened criminal but a soft-spoken banker who is convicted
killing his wife and her lover. Like everyone in Shawshank, he claims to be innocent. Red, the narrator of the story, is known as the guy who can get stuff. He
also gets unfairly treated by both the guards and the other prisoners. In the Shawshank, Andy gets some troubles that threaten his life. Therefore, he struggles
to keep alive and avoid getting more troubles and the more important is to get free from Shawshank. The third is about the main character’s struggle. Here, the
readers can see the main character, Andy Dufresne, struggling to live as a result for being unfairly treated by the other characters in the story. First, he has to
defend his own in the court session. After that, he also finds other problems that must be solved in his live in prison until he escapes from the prison.
As a result, from those three ways, I am interested to analyze the novella mainly about the main character’s struggle to live, the second way. In order to
understand more about the novella I also watch its movie as the secondary sources to analyze the novella.
B. Objectives of the Study