Spoiler Alert: The Green Mile’s Paul Edgecomb gets cured of a urinary tract infection by John Coffey, and somehow gets to live to 108 at the end of the tale.
But how many more years is he going to live?
The book has one of my favorite endings: “We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long”
Well, Mr. Jingles (the mouse) lived through the end of the movie, which was 64 years past the events involving John Coffey
Your average mouse lifespan is a couple of years, more or less.
So we can figure that Mr. Jingles has outlived his normal lifespan by something like 32 times.
Assuming that the “normal” human lifespan is the “three score and ten”(70 years) from Psalm 90 (I figure when referring “The Green Mile”, religious estimates of lifespan are appropriate), then we can assume that Paul is just barely getting started on his expected lifetime of 2240 years.
Or, we could figure that maybe Mr. Jingles absorbed the same amount of mojo/magic/divine glow from John as Paul did. Taking into account size and assuming that Mr. Jingles is maybe 50 grams, and that Paul weighs about 80 kg, we can figure that Mr Jingles took 1600x the dosage that Paul did. Not sure how the math would work out on that, but I think that would imply that Paul’s life wouldn’t have been unduly extended.
Ultimately though, with the mouse not yet dead, it’s all just speculation as to what Paul’s minimum expected lifespan would be.
Mr. Jingles was brought back from the dead, while Paul was merely cured of an infection, so I think it is safe to assume that Mr. Jingles got a much higher “dose” than Paul did, so I don’t think Mr. Jingles is a good guide for Paul’s life expectancy.
The actor who played “old” Paul was 82 at the time. So let’s just say that Paul is 108 with the physical appearance of 82. Meaning that his life span can be assumed to be 1.3 times as long as expected (108/82).
In 1999 (when the movie was released), life expectancy for a 75 year old man was 10 years. So call it an 85 year life expectancy for a normal human of his age at the time. 85 time 1.3 is 110.5. So figure he lives another 2 and a half years.
Yeah, I know. We’re applying math to magic, so take it for what it’s worth - which is not much.
At least two of you are misremembering. Being cured of the infection didn’t really have anything to do with Paul’s extra long life. That was from being given insight into what Wild Bill had done.
I remember that from the movie. Was it in the book(s) also?
It is, yes. I have the entire thing in one paperback.
He’s 108 IIRC, which is very old but not unheard of, and while he’s in good shape for his age I wouldn’t call him in phenomenal shape by any means. (Frank Buckles survived WW1 and the Bataan Death March and Japanese POW camps and lived to be older than that.)
He’ll probably make it to the age of other supercentarians if that- 110-120- but not immortal and probably not record shattering.
I dunno. I got the very strong impression that Paul was more or less stuck living an extraordinarily long life as a sort of penance, which implies to me that he’ll live a lifespan well beyond the “normal” long lifespans that we hear about.
Bingo. I thought the same thing. I thought that was the whole point of the scene at the end: to tell us that.
But since we don’t know his actual lifespan, now the real debt he’s payng for, it’s basically impossible to know how long that might be. He could live to be 120, or 2,120.
Sure, but again, the implication of having a 64 year old mouse in the story and movie implies that this lifespan is going to be absurdly long.
Personally, my guess was that it would be on the order of a few hundred years, not thousands.