Andy Dufresne Timeline and Summary

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• Andy becomes a big-shot banker before the age of 30, "good work for a man as young as he was." (8)
• His wife cheats on him with the local golf pro. He becomes despondent and buys a gun, then gets drunk and hangs out by the golf pro's house. He then leaves, thinking he's going to sleep it off and give her a divorce. Boy is he in for a surprise.
• Andy's wife and lover are killed that night and boy does Andy look guilty. Off he goes to Shawshank.
• He arrives and works in the laundry for a while.
• He asks Red to smuggle in a rock hammer so he can continue his geology hobby.
• Andy struggles to fend off the local rape gang. In one notable case, he defeats them by promising "Anything of yours that you stick in my mouth, you're going to lose it." (95)
• Somebody beats the leader of the rape gang to within an inch of his life, probably at Andy's request.
• Andy asks Red for a big poster of Rita Hayworth. He gives Red some polished stones as a way of saying thank you. Other girlie posters follow over the years.
• Andy and Red find themselves on a roof-tarring detail one spring day. Andy convinces Bryon Hadley, a guard, to buy all the prisoners beer in exchange for help with some inheritance money.
• Word gets around and Andy soon gets a job in the prison library. Also doing the guards taxes, setting up trust funds and laundering the various chunks of dirty money rolling through the prison.
• He expands the library and helps some cons get their high school diplomas, while also helping the new warden, Sam Norton, scam a king's ransom in illicit funds.
• A prisoner named Tommy Williams arrives and tells Andy about his former cellmate… who bragged about killing Andy's wife.
• Andy sees Norton about getting his case reopened. Norton throws him in the hole and has Tommy transferred to a cushy country-club prison in order to buy his silence. He then tells Andy that, "You'll do the hardest time it's possible to do" (311) if any of the financial scams stop.
• Andy talks with Red and tells him about this hidden cache of fake IDs he has. He key for it is hidden in a hayfield in Buxton, Maine. Andy also mentions a coastal town in Mexico and how he's going to build a hotel there if he ever gets out.
• He then gets out… namely by crawling through a tunnel he's been digging with that rock hammer and hiding with his girlie posters. He promptly vanishes and Norton is forced to resign.
• We don't know for sure where he goes from there, but Red gets a postcard from Texas where he probably crossed the border. By implication, he ends his days running that hotel down in Mexico.