Harrison Bergeron

3 Pages 678 Words

Harrison Bergeron Essay

In the short story “Harrison Bergeron”, the author, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., uses his natural ability of satire to illustrate a dystopian future, where the value of ‘equality’ is said to be held above all else. However, as we explore the meaning of the story we find that Vonnegut is actually warning us that in a world where we hold anything as an absolute the result will always be disastrous to the human condition and furthermore that such absolutes are usually the result of bad intentions.
In “Harrison Bergeron”, the society in which the characters live is centered around the seemingly virtuous ideal of equality, opening with the almost macabre line, “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal.” As the story moves along into the family life of the Bergeron’s, we are shown what this foreboding line means; beautiful people are made to wear masks, thin or strong people made to wear weights, and clever people to wear radio transmitters in their ears to keep them from “taking unfair advantage of their brains”. Everyone is in one way or another hampered by handicaps, dropped to an arbitrary average decided by an all-powerful Handicapper-General.
The reader’s mind quickly screams with injustice, that this is not equality at all, and they’re right. Vonnegut wanted to blatantly outrage the reader into knowing the truth, which, is that the result of this world of theoretical equality is actually uniformity and a loss of individuality. Humans are no longer able to express their natural creativeness as they are blocked by noises in their ears, or subdued by other means. Progress, material and spiritual, comes to a standstill when our freedom of action is silenced, which is precisely what happens in the story. While the specific outcome is somewhat unique in it’s form of handicaps, the stifling of what makes us human is not unique to the absolute value of equality. If we were to hold any v...