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human relationships. For example, students need teachers to help them gain knowledge, a child needs parents to give them love and care as well as to help
them grow. Unfortunately, what people found in the reality does not conform to
what was expected above. Some even face such problems come from the people living around them, which is their social surrounding, and it is not rarely that the
problems are known as kinds of pressure. This fact, which is so called social pressure, is mostly experienced in young age. It is normal to say that a teenage
year is a complex time in human life. Adolescents are often unstrained by social norms. They do not know where they fit in social neighborhood, including in his
family and peers. They are expected to act in a mature attitude, choose and decide something for their own future yet they are not ready to take the risks while their
attitudes sometimes cause a problem for others. If they are faced by the social norms, they will usually consider those norms seem to be trivial or unimportant
because they always want to be free from anything. That is why adolescents are used to rebel against authority.
Having much concern to the fact stated above, therefore, the study is aimed to find out how far such social pressure among adolescents might influence
their psychological life, either in the way of acting or thinking. Night Train 1998, an Australian novel written by Judith Clarke, is one good form of
literature which best represents the case of which the writer wants to dig out. This novel has such unique way of depicting reality problems among a teenager and
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his social surrounding. As what happens to Luke, the main character of the novel, here Judith Clarke wants to implicitly analyze Luke’s suffering from
psychological pressures caused by the negative attitudes of the people surround him, including his family, teachers and peers. His “bad label” as a trouble maker
leads him to suffer from such psychological distraction, such as hallucination, which finally brings him to tragic death.
B. Objectives of the Study
There are two aims that can be achieved from this study. First, this study attempts to see the character of Luke as a figure of a teenager in general.
Second, the study is aimed to find out how such social pressure among adolescents affect Luke’s psychological life, either in the way of acting or
thinking, as seen in Judith Clarke’s Night Train.
C. Problem Formulation
Based on the explanation above, there are two problems formulated by the writer:
1. How is the character of Luke, as the representative of adolescents in general, described in the novel?
2. How do social pressures among adolescents affect Luke’s psychological life, either in the way of acting or thinking?
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D. Definition of Terms
In this section, I will clarify some terms in order to make the readers better understand the content of the study and to avoid any misconception due to
it. Some those terms are:
1. Social Pressure
According to Chaplin, social pressure is any type of coercion exerted by an institution or a group of individual 434. In an online article, it was stated
that social pressures are the combined pressures that are around us during everyday life Margaret. She noted that there are several kinds of social pressures
which teens are familiar with, including peer pressure, academic pressure, and socioeconomic pressure. Another online source mentions that social pressures are
used to come from many social environments in which we live, and those are exerted by culture, religion, family, friends, hobbies, etc.
In this study, social pressure is defined as a kind of pressure which generally comes from people living around one’s life, particularly family and
peers. Social pressure is found to be one factor which mostly causes lots of problems towards one’s psychological life, in this case is mental depression
experienced by an adolescent named Luke.
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2. Adolescent
Hornby as stated in Oxford Sixth Advanced Learners’ Dictionary of Current English defines adolescent as a young person who is developing from a
child into an adult 18. Furthermore, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia defines adolescence as a transitional stage of physical and mental human development
that occurs between childhood and adulthood. According to the World Health Organization WHO, adolescence covers the period of life between 10 and 20
years of age. The transitional stage mentioned above involves biological i.e.
pubertal, social, and psychological changes. Furthermore, it is explained that adolescence represents the period of time during which a person experiences a
variety of biological changes and encounters a number of emotional issues. The end of adolescence and the beginning of adulthood varies by country as well as by
function, as even within a single country there will be different ages at which an individual is considered mature enough to be entrusted with particular tasks, such
as driving a vehicle, having sexual relations, serving in the armed forces, voting, or marrying.
In this study, adolescent refers to a young person who is experiencing such kind of transitional period from a child into an adult. Lots of changes in
physical, mental and emotional normally occur during this age, which in fact lead to many personal and social problems, as revealed in Luke, the figure of an
adolescent in common.
