The Green Mile

The Green Mile

When watching The Green Mile, I had noticed that my life was very similar to Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks). At the end of the movie is when my life became part of the movie. Paul lives his life throughout the movie as a prison guard; it’s like that with my life because it feels like I always try to keep people from getting away and it just feels like every person in my life is locked up there.

The Green Mile is about a man who is now living in an old-age home, and is telling a story to his friend Elaine Connelly. After six decades of working as the head guard on Death Row at Cold Mountain Penitentiary, he had finally retired after the execution of John Coffey. He looked over a quartet full of killers awaiting their final walk down “the Green Mile”, the long stretch of green linoleum flooring which took the convicts from their cell to the electric chair. He had walked that stretch of floor with many different cons, but he had never in his life met a man like John Coffey. As the story unfolded, Paul learned that, sometimes, miracles happen in the most unexpected places. Paul lived to be 108 years if not longer, it never really says, he had lived this long because he believed that God was punishing him for killing one of His miracles. He lived life day by day and eventually all the people he learned to love died without him.

I feel that my life is like Paul’s because I feel as if everyone around me, the people I love most, is all dying and I am still living. When I was 12 my father had passed away, the next day my step-grandfather had passed on as well. In a way my father played the roll of John Coffey, he had shown me many miracles and he was the one person that knew me best. John had understood Paul like my father had understood me. After my father had passed away I knew I could never do the things I had once done, just like Paul and working at the penitentiary. Never being able to work “the Green Mile” after John Coffey had passed on. That was when my long life had started, just like Paul’s after the execution of John. Later on that year I had lost two more friends in