Dead Poets Society has such an amazing storyline. It’s a novel by N.H. Kleinbaum and a movie written by Tom Schulman. It has such a profound way of speaking to the readers and watchers, and it faces many challenges, such as finding your voice, challenging conformity, parental pressure, embracing passion and individuality, and facing oppressive traditions. The Junior English class will watch this movie as part of their unit on the Transcendentalists, so the juniors have yet to see it will get a chance to.
It starts off in a conservative, all-boys school called Welton Academy in 1959, where you can see the boys on the first day of school. Some of the main characters are Neil Perry, Todd Anderson, Knox Overstreet, Charlie Dalton, Richard Cameron, Steven Meeks, and Gerard Pitts. Each one of these boys faces challenges in their own way and finds their own way to cope with them. On the first day, they introduce a new English teacher, and his name is John Keating. When the boys had Keating’s class for the first time, they were astonished by the way he was teaching because he was different from the other teachers at the school. He said to the boys that they can refer to him as Mr. Keating or ‘O Captain! My Captain! This caused many of the boys to admire him.
The more you read or watch, the more you’ll see how the boys are affected by him in so many ways. The boys were intrigued by Keating, and Neil went to find Keating Senior’s annual in the library. That’s when they found something called Dead Poets Society. This caused a major shift in the story. The boys decided to ask Keating what it was. When talking to him, they found out it was a secret organization where a small group of them would meet in an old cave and take turns reading poetry. After this, Neil started to hold meetings with the boys where they would go to the cave and could express themselves.
Keating taught the boys that they needed to embrace poetry individually and come out of their comfort zone and find their voice. The more classes they had, the more they went outside the rules set for them. The other teachers and the headmaster, Gale Nolan, started to become suspicious of Keating due to the way he was teaching the boys. At this point, Knox and Neil are facing big problems because they were going outside the rules set by the school and their parents.
Knox chases after what he wants, and Neil wants to take on a dream of his, but he knows it goes against what his parents want. He has the support of his friends and Mr. Keating. Watching Neil be happy facing his dream, the other boys head over to the cave when Mr. Keating joins them and leads the group. After breaking his parents’ rules, Neil faces an even bigger problem than before, and this causes a lasting effect on all of the boys, including Mr. Keating. By the end of the story, many are left heartbroken or are left feeling speechless.
So while the storyline may be sad or inspiring to some, it captures a classic carpe diem attitude towards life, and it is worth reading or watching. So if you’re looking for something with meaning or for a good storyline, Dead Poets Society is something that could be the one for you.
