Dead Poets Society is set in an exclusive boys college, Welton Academy, in rural Vermont, USA. The year is 1959. The plot centralizes around the impact the new English professor; John Keating has on some of his students. Keating encourages his students to go beyond the domineering authority of the school and inspires them to conquer not only their own identity, but to achieve a state of personal emancipation. We follow the boys' lives as they revolutionize from a state of conformity to one of personal liberation.

This striving for conformity is also represented in the short story called One-Leg Island, by Walter Murdoch. This story demonstrates conformity in a different way. The younger generations believe it is ritual to remove the left leg at the age of six. The elders believe that when a child reaches six years of age, they begin to give themselves airs about having...