Dead Poets Society

            Carpe Diem. Seize the day; suck the marrow out of the bone of life.  What is life without passion? Asks Mr. Keaton to his students.  Indeed, most, if not all, of the students at the school go through the motions following a path set by their parents without any say or consideration.  This sets Todd and Neil’s internal journeys in motion from the get go.  Two roommates, both with their own problems end up being each other’s pillars as their lives start over.

On one side, Todd is a young man who suffers from finding his own voice in what Walt Whitman calls the play of life.  He suffers from being painfully shy and this keeps him from accepting help from the people who care about him. Only when he is pushed to his limits does he find it in himself to become the person he has locked up inside for too long.  Mr. Keaton describes Todd indirectly, but perfectly when he quotes Thoreau by saying: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation”.  Afraid of the world might think of him, Todd defies his own wishes and desires in order to conform to this third person view he has of himself: a frightened turtle, hiding in his shell; an ostrich sticking its head in the dirt.  At first, he refuses to join his classmates in their Dead Poets Society meeting because he is afraid of the outside world in every sense.  This is how his external journey begins: Neil gives him no excuse to not go.  In a sense, his external journey is not about travelling, but becoming vulnerable to the world and accepting the reality that life is unpredictable and sometimes the greatest risks are the ones that pay off the most. 

Next to Todd, Neil starts off as a complete opposite: an outgoing, expressive and charismatic young man. As opposed to Todd, Neil already knows what his inner voice is, but struggles to let it out.  His greatest obstacle is his father who decided that Neil must become a doctor and emphasizes how he cannot let them down and that his desires for acting are only but a whim on the grand scheme of things. Like his friend Todd, he finds liberation in Mr. Keaton’s teaching about finding passion in life and sticking to it.  He took this advice to heart and decided to join a play without talking about it with his father. He chose to ignore his problems, his external journey, and chose to enjoy the bliss of ignorance.  Like Maya Angelou wrote so beautifully: “The caged bird sings of freedom”.  The only problem being that this caged bird tasted freedom, but a false one. After experiencing life out of a cage, there was no going back and that is why he took his own life once his father locked him in once again. In his death, he brought out the voice in his own classmates, especially Todd.