In the entire life cycle of a human being, teenage stage is the fun, memorable, and some time the wild part. In this teenage stage, the teenagers experiment with everything without caring about the consequences. For most people, the life prior to the teenage stage is the most exciting part because there are no worries; every thing is fun. When the teenage life begins, most of their behaviours change while adapting to various habits. They follow good and bad behaviours as the result of influences from their parents, friends, teachers and the society they live in. These behaviours and societal norms combined with enthusiastic nature makes teenagers do various things.
The result of their activities gives them the basic knowledge of the real world. Dead Poets Society, by N.H. Kleinbaum, and A Separate Peace, John Knowles, are two novels that focus on the difficult journey towards maturity and the adult world of the teenage boys. They focus on the learning experience of friendship and self esteem through the death of others. Both John Keating and Finny (Phineas) are great leaders who face many difficulties in achieving their goal and often become the victims.
Dead Poets Society opens with Keating being a substitute teacher for an English class and encouraging his students to make their lives meaningful and extraordinary by referring to the word “Carpe Diem” (25). This is the Latin word for seize the Day and he wants them to seek out their dreams and to believe in themselves. Keating believes that education requires the student to think for himself. He must be free to question and to learn in the way that he learns best.
A Separate Peace opens with Finny being portrayed as a brave sixteen years old boy who strongly believes in and encourages other students in his class to act upon their wishes. Both characters are optimistic about making a change in other people’s lives to make them better. Keating encourages the students to write poems to express their feelings. Finny on the other hand, encourages his friends to skip classes and do wild things like jumping off the tree. Neil, one of Keating’s students, follows his wishes and disobeys his father.
At the end, Neil kills himself when his father decides to take him out of school. Yet Keating is blamed for Neil’s death and is expelled from his position. The persistent theme of A Separate Peace is the fall of a complex friendship.
A Separate Peace is a coming of age novel in which Gene, the main character, revisits his high school and his traumatic teen years. When Gene was a teen-ager his best friend and roommate Phineas (Finny) was the star athlete of the school.
By reading the Bible, a direct instruction of living life by His word, Christians can find this comfort and happiness. To the boys attending the poetry class, Keating is a source of the same comfort. Because of Keating’s helpful instruction and caring attitude towards the boys, his character resembles the wise image of God. Keating often has to advise the students to practice free will with caution because of society’s dramatic responses to transcendental actions. In one scene, Neil is confronted by his selfish father, who stringently demands his son to not take part in the school’s play. Later, Neil goes to Keating for advice on what choice to make and explains that he is the only person who Neil can really talk to about his true feelings. Keating then tells Neil to honestly tell the narrow-minded father about what he really wants to do with his life. This advice follows the importance of self-reliance. “Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession” (Emerson). Neil should be proud of his talent and stay persistent against his father in order to live a life of nonconformity. Just as society denied God’s words before the
Throughout the novel, A Separate Peace, the author John Knowles conveys many messages of symbolism. The symbolism can be found in an array of ways, ranging from internal war, to the theme of human aggression, and a variety of religious principles. The main characters, Gene and Phineas, and their story could be paralleled to the biblical story of Adam and Eve. The similarities can be seen in the way in which in both of the stories, everyone is living in perfect harmony and peace until something comes along to disrupt it. Also in how the main characters do something out of jealousy, greed, and selfishness; and in addition, how Finny's fall out of a tree relates to the “Fall of Mankind.”
Knowles’ moving novel, A Separate Peace, reveals many alarming features of adolescence, and human nature. Knowles shows that humans will naturally develop an enemy, and will fight them. The main character Gene develops a resentful hatred, which leads to his friend Finny’s untimely death. A liberal humanistic critique reveals that the novel has a self contained meaning, expresses the enhancement of life, and shows that human nature is unchanging.
Overall, it appears that Peck's theories on love and discipline provide an effective tool for analysis of relationships between characters in "The Dead Poets Society." This mutual relevance is even supported symbolically, when Professor Keating quotes Robert Frost and his "choosing the road less traveled," which is actually the title of Peck's book.
During the 1940’s in America, times were hard. It was a time of war. In this period of history, people found themselves looking for peace and innocence. John Knowles’s A Separate Peace illustrates a boarding school, one of the only places left to find peace, where the main characters, Gene and Phineas, face their own internal wars with each other. Starting out their friendship seems strong and everlasting but as the novel progresses, like all friendships, the fire between them seems to dwindle. Although they share the goal of excelling, Phineas and Gene clearly differ in athletics, academics, and personality.
In A Separate Peace by John Knowles, two boys named Gene and Finny attend a New England boarding school, where they learn to overcome challenging obstacles and make life-changing decisions as they come of age. The boys live in a microcosm of World War II, with loyalty and deception constantly thrown around. Gene is an introverted, hard working intellectual and his friend, Phineas, is an outgoing, daring athlete. When jealousy and competition start to come in play, tensions begin to rise. Through Gene and Finny’s perspective on jealousy and the competition between the friends, John Knowles illustrates their rivalry as the barrier dividing the boys and their friendship.
"Looking back now across fifteen years, I could see with great clarity the fear I had lived in, which must mean that in the interval I had succeeded in a very important undertaking: I must have made my escape from it" ( Knowles 5). In this novel A Separate Peace, using these words, John Knowles reveals the fear that haunts the students at Devon and when they proceeded with all their training for the war they mature into adults.
Dr. Wayne Dyer once said, “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” This saying is also true for the personality of Brinker Hadley, a character in A Separate Peace. In this novel, Brinker and his group of friends spend their time at Devon School making memories with exciting, yet dangerous adventures. With the idea of World War II in the back of their minds, the boys are trying to focus on the joys in life. However, a situation caused by Brinker’s questioning brings great sorrow. Brinker Hadley represents a headstrong, lawful, and perhaps misconceived character in this novel,
Throughout the text Keating connects with people on a personal level through his word choice and tone. This connection with his audience allows him to further develop belonging, and evoke a greater emotional response in his audience. This word choice and tone can be seen in the lines, “We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We practiced discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice.”
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Dead Poet Society explore the struggle for independence through characters who are subject to an environment in which they are rewarded for their conformity. Dead Poet Society outlines the complications of young students at Welton Academy after a respected English teacher named Mr. Keating inspires them to seize the day. However, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest explore the events that transpire in a mental institute after an exceedingly ‘difficult’ patient arrives and the impact this has on Chief Bromden. Both texts critically explore the struggle for independence.
The plot in the story is rather interesting. The exposition is simple. A group of students have a English teacher who is very creative in the way he teaches. One of the students finds out about a group that Mr. Keating was in when he went to the school. Him and his friends decide that they would start it again. The rising action is when the kids start to have the meetings. The students get a little more crazy than the have been before. The climax is when Knox shots himself. Everything falls apart after that. The kids start to get in arguments, Mr. Keating is blamed for his death, and the school board is very angry. The falling action is when the students start to come back together to get Mr. Keating back in the school. The resolution is when Mr. Keating goes into the classroom to get the last of the supplies.
The boys go through the day collecting mounds of homework, and then they enter Mr. Keating’s class. Mr. Keating walks into class and then walks out telling everyone to follow him and he explains “carpe diem” to the class. The year goes on and the boys re-establish the Dead Poets Society, a group that was dedicated to “Sucking to marrow out of life,” in an old Indian cave outside the school and have meetings there every Friday. The boys soon grow into their new beliefs, Neil gets a part in a play, and when his father finds out they get into a fight opening night Later that night, something horrible happens. The boys are scared because the administration is investigating into what happened the night before, and Cameron cracks and snitches on the boys and tells the administration that it was all Mr. Keating’s fault.
The movie, Dead Poets Society, takes place at Welton Academy, an elite preparatory school for boys. The four pillars of the school’s philosophy are tradition, honor, discipline, and excellence. The new English teacher, a Welton Academy alumnus, is John Keating, played by Robin Williams. Keating believes that the purpose of education is to teach students to think for themselves. John Keating challenges the traditional learning techniques with a new progressive and humanistic approach, through a student-centered curriculum.
Keating goes above and beyond at developing the minds of his students, including helping Todd find the poet within himself, and supporting Neil when Neil’s father didn’t want Neil to act. Overall, Mr. Keating and his actions pushed the ideas of creativity and self-thought throughout the film.