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The Green Mile - Stephen King

The Green Mile was the first book I read written by Stephen King, using his own name (I had read the roadwork earlier, which was written under his pseudonym Richard Bachman). So, I was extremely enchanted by the book that I couldn’t put it down. It was a well organised from page one to the end.

For your information I was reading this book as a whole novella. I have to state this here because it was released part by part initially. That is why if you read the novel as a whole now you can see after a new part begins King takes a few pages to recap what had happened earlier in the story in case the readers have forgotten, which was quite annoying, but that is why god gave us the ability to skip stuff.

“The Green Mile” is another one of King’s books where the supernatural is presented in a realistic setting. I am not well aware of the concept of ‘magical realism’ to call this that but I’m putting it out there. The story begins at a penitentiary, where there is an electric chair to execute people, to put it simply. I have always had mixed opinions about the death penalty. I can’t say that I’m totally against it, because sometimes the need to exact punishment or some sort of repercussion becomes so strong that it outweighs all the logical and ethical arguments in my mind against it. Most primary of them arguments being, what if the person we sentence to die is actually innocent. That has always been the big question with the judicial system, right? That is why in many countries we have the “Innocent until proven guilty” sort of judicial arrangement. But even then we can’t say with a 100% certainty that every person who is persecuted by the court is guilty of the charges on him. We like to believe so. This becomes even more problematic in the case of a Death Penalty. Usually the crimes that demand a death penalty are stuff that people are extremely riled up about. Crimes that in no way can be glamorized or ridiculed. When people are riled up about something like this they want a quick retribution. This puts the judiciary and the investigating institutions under a lot of pressure to deliver results as soon as possible, leading to erratic judgement by the officials involved. This may cost us the life of an innocent person.

What Green Mile does is presents us with a lot of death row inmates, their life, what they had been, what they were trying to change in their lives, during confinement and so on. So we can better understand feeling of the people involved in such situations. The author in no way tries to reduce the severity of their crimes. But offers a different eye to the subject. Book contains many symbolism and underlying themes that makes it a re-readable story, even after you know about all the twists and turns of the book. There are a lot of brilliant and cinematic scenes that really moves you. You won’t complete this book without at least feeling a little congestion in your chest or tears filling in your eyes.


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