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Conformity And Consensus In John Up, Run, And Catcher In The

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Conformity And Consensus In John Up, Run, And Catcher In The
Novels have been used to tell the story of events in history. The novel can partly or completely explore the story on the social conditions or events related to certain points in history, the time it is written notwithstanding. The authors of such novels tend to blend their imagination and creativity with the historical facts of the time their work of art allude to. The mastery of the social and historical events related to the particular time period is important in a bid to accurately portray the attitudes, ideas, tendencies as well as the themes of the time. This is also important to merge the narrative, in all aspects, into the thematic material. Successful works of art have an important role to play in appealing to the emotions of the audience as well as reveal an important understanding of the specified time period. This essay uses two novels to discuss the notions of conformity and consensus in the material abundance of 1950s America. Specifically, Rabbit, Run (John Updike, 1960) and Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger, 1951), are the novels that are used in this paper to discuss the theme of conformity versus dissent. …show more content…
Democracy as an idea of freedom and freedom for an individual to invent and create oneself was being challenged by the need to conform to the American societal values, such as education (like in Catcher in the Rye) and marriage (like in Rabbit, Run). It was becoming very hard for the Americans to discover their own values independent of those established by the society. A culture of consumption, and therefore that of conformity had almost taken root in the society at the time (LaFeber, Polenberg and Woloch, 2013). However, this does not mean that there was no dissent among the members of the society as it is the case with the two novels. On the other hand, those who dissented to the values would suffer some
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