200 words plus

In the Dead Poet’s Society there are several challenges shown throughout the course of the movie. I think that the obvious theme of the movie is to beware of conforming, and be your own person. A few characters who helped illustrate this main point include Mr. Keating, Neil Perry, Todd Anderson, and Charlie (Nwanda) Dalton. Mr. Keating wanted his students to know that life was more than just getting an education and pursuing a career that made them successful and gave them money. Life is about so much more, and he wanted his students to understand that. He also wanted them to appreciate poetry (which was appropriate considering that he was the poetry teacher) but he did it in a very unique way. One of the activities that he had his students do was to walk around a courtyard, but to their own step. He was showing them that when they write and read poetry, it means something special to them, and it should be unique. He also wanted them to learn that in life, sometimes you have to be your own person, and not conform. Neil Perry’s story is very tragic, and can leave a lasting impact. His passion was acting, but his father felt that if his son pursued that passion he would be throwing his life away, so he told him that he was sending Neil to military school. Neil was so grief stricken, and he thought that the only way out of his future life of torture was death. He was so afraid to conform to his father’s ideas of his future that it literally killed him. Todd was my favorite character and, I think, the most influential. He stood up for what was right, even though it scared him to death (figuratively). Charlie was also afraid of conforming, but not to the detrimental extreme of Neil’s fear. He just wanted to make sure that he was uniquely different, which is one of the reasons why he ‘changed his name’ to Nwanda.