1 - False Ideals in Society When our founding fathers wrote...

False Ideals in Society
When our founding fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence, they wrote
about ideals that they thought that society would have to conform to. Society’s constant
pressures that force one to conform, invalidate the democratic ideals expressed in the
Declaration of Independence that “…all men are created equal, that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among those are Life, Liberty, and the
pursuit of Happiness”. The novel Catcher in the Rye written by J.D. Salinger and the
movie Dead Poets Society directed by Peter Weir, illustrate the pressures present in
society today and how those pressures force one to conform to society. Characters in both
texts are put into predicaments that lead one to believe that the democratic ideals in the
Declaration of Independence are false. The characters are also different in the way they
conform to the pressures.
One of the ideals in the Declaration of Independence is the right to live. In an
idealistic, utopian society, everybody would live their own lives and wouldn’t have
society pressuring them to make different decisions or to change their way of thinking.
Characters from Catcher in the Rye and Dead Poets Society , such as Holden Caulfield
and Neil Perry, are pressured to make different decisions and are constantly pressured to
alter their thinking. Holden is pressured to stay in school and to apply himself. After
learning that Holden got expelled, Phoebe yelled “‘Daddy’ll kill you!’” (Salinger, 165)
expressing the pressure that Holden’s father puts on him to stay in school. Holden is
being threatened to get “killed” if he didn’t stay in school. His father is pressuring him to

stay, so Holden can't make his own decision to quit school or to go to another school.
Holden is pressured to go to Pencey by his parents, even though he thinks the school is
“phony”. From Dead Poets Society , Neil is pressured a lot by his father to take certain
courses and get into an Ivy League school. Neil’s father doesn’t take Neil’s interests into