thesis statement examples for harrison bergeron

A Summary and Analysis of Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Harrison Bergeron’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Harrison Bergeron’ is a 1961 short story by the American writer Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007). The story can be categorised as ‘dystopian satire’ or a ‘satirical dystopian story’, but we’ll say more about these labels in a moment. The action of the story takes place in the future America of 2081, where everyone has been made truly equal, physically, mentally, and aesthetically.

Plot summary

The story is set in the United States in 2081. True equality has finally been achieved: nobody is allowed to be stronger, more beautiful, or more intelligent than anyone else, so people who are deemed to have an unfair advantage are forced by law to use ‘handicaps’ which limit their powers or talents. A Handicapper General, named Diana Moon Glampers, is in charge of ensuring everyone obeys the law and wears their assigned handicaps at all times.

The story focuses on a couple, George and Hazel Bergeron, whose fourteen-year-old son Harrison is taken away so that he can be ‘handicapped’ because he is abnormally strong and intelligent. George is of above-average intelligence so is forced to wear earpieces which transmit distracting noises every twenty seconds, so that he cannot concentrate or, or think about things, for too long and thus use his intellect to his advantage.

George also carries forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, hung around his neck, to reduce his natural athleticism. When his wife suggests opening a hole in the bottom of the bag and removing some of the lead balls, because she can see how worn-out he is, he reminds her that such a crime carries a prison sentence and a fine.

George and Hazel watch ballerinas dancing on television, but George is unimpressed by them, since they aren’t very good: no more than average, at least, because they are not allowed to be supremely gifted at ballet. The naturally attractive dancers, like other beautiful people in society, are forced to wear masks which make them look less attractive.

The ballet show is interrupted by a live news broadcast, which reveals that their son, Harrison Bergeron, has escaped from jail, where he had been held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. Harrison enters the studios where the ballerinas are dancing, and tears off the handicaps he has been made to wear, which include a red rubber ball for a nose (like a clown) to make him look less handsome, and a large pair of headphones rather than the small radio his father is made to wear.

Harrison then announces that he will become emperor of the world, and asks for a woman to claim her prize as his empress. One of the beautiful ballerinas steps forward, and he removes her mask and frees her of her handicaps. He does the same to the other dancers and the musicians, and orders them to play good music.

Harrison and the dancer then ascend to the ceiling, floating above the ground, and exchange a long kiss. At that moment, Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, arrives and shoots them both dead, before ordering the dancers and musicians to put their handicaps back on.

George, who was in the kitchen getting himself a beer, misses the killing of his own son live on television, while Hazel, owing to her low intelligence, almost immediately forgets what she has seen.

This story is satirical, but what precisely is Vonnegut satirising in ‘Harrison Bergeron’? Is he taking aim at the idea of state-mandated equity, which forces everyone to be mediocre, in order to show the absurdity of such a notion? Or is he, in fact, satirising those who would oppose attempts to level the playing field for everyone?

This latter interpretation is not as unlikely as it may first appear. The first thing to establish is that Kurt Vonnegut was aware of the dangers of government overreach, and the future society depicted in ‘Harrison Bergeron’ is clearly one in which the state has too much power over the individual. They can force people to carry bags of bullets around their necks to disadvantage them physically, and even prevent them from thinking too much. People are fed a diet of mediocre television to keep them docile and compliant.

This aspect of ‘Harrison Bergeron’ reads almost like a more extreme version of Ray Bradbury’s dystopias of the 1950s: not just Fahrenheit 451 , in which books are banned because the government wants to keep everyone stupid and passive, but Bradbury’s short story ‘ The Pedestrian ’, in which the police threaten to arrest a lone man walking the streets of an evening because he isn’t sitting in front of the television, consuming a diet of cultural dross, like everyone else.

But the other key theme in Vonnegut’s story, besides government overreach and the state’s attempts to keep everyone intellectually lazy, is the one for which it is perhaps best known: egalitarianism, or the struggle for equality between all people. And on this issue, ‘Harrison Bergeron’ strikes a more ambivalent note.

On the one hand, the idea of state-mandated weights, radios, and masks to render supremely strong, clever, or beautiful people as weak, stupid, and ugly as the rest of the population strikes us as preposterously evil. Rather than pushing for a race to the bottom, a responsible and progressive government would seek to encourage weak citizens to pick up weights and build up their muscles, educate less intelligent members of society, and devise surgical techniques (such as plastic surgery) to make ugly people more attractive.

In one respect, then, Vonnegut’s story reads as a bedfellow of those satires which view communism or socialism as a way of making everyone equally miserable and poor, rather than trying to make everyone equally successful and financially comfortable.

Such an analysis is certainly defensible when we turn to the story and witness the ways in which, for instance, George Bergeron is effectively punished for his natural intellect by being bombarded with state-sanctioned noises on a regular basis: a peculiar kind of torture. The idea that one’s fourteen-year-old son could be taken away simply for being unusually strong and intelligent is abominable.

And yet Vonnegut doesn’t actually tell us why Harrison is taken away initially. We are just told that he has been taken away: nothing more. The news broadcast announces that he has been imprisoned for trying to overthrow the government.

Given George and Hazel’s short memories, and the fact that the story is focalised through them, we don’t learn, despite the story having a supposedly ‘omniscient’ third-person narrator, whether Harrison was simply taken away for being different or arrested because he had already presented a threat to the state by plotting a coup.

After all, George and Hazel have been allowed, following the application of their handicaps, to live ‘freely’ (at least relatively so) in their own home. Why was Harrison taken away? Because he was not just a little bit more intelligent than the average person, but vastly more ingenious than everyone else, so that all existing handicaps were useless on him? Or because he is already plotting something? The story refuses to tell us this.

Similarly, although the shooting of Harrison and his new girlfriend at the end of the story is shocking, Harrison’s lust for power – seeking to use his natural height, strength, and intellect to become ruler of the whole world – also strikes us as a nightmare prospect, so that the shock of his death is likely to be tempered with some degree of relief.

‘Harrison Bergeron’, in the last analysis, is a story which invites us to consider the lengths we are prepared to go to as a society in order to achieve equality. Clearly there are some things, like dancing or athletics or even thinking, which some people are more naturally gifted at than others. Do we want to punish them for their natural talent, or appreciate the things their gifts allow them to do? Just because we will never be an Olympic athlete, do we think it unfair that others get the chance to win a gold medal?

Most reasonable people would answer ‘no’ to this question. People are different, with different talents and skills. An ugly person might be extremely clever. A clever person might be a physical weakling. A body-builder might be thicker than a whale omelette. And Vonnegut’s point in ‘Harrison Bergeron’ appears to be twofold: first, that failing to accept that people are different from us is bad, and second, that government overreach is also bad.

And it is worth remembering that in 1961, when the story was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction , America was still struggling towards the legislation which would recognise that all citizens were in fact equal before the law. The Civil Rights movement would, throughout the 1960s, see African-Americans asserting their equality as racial segregation was gradually written out of state laws.

What this means is that ‘Harrison Bergeron’ is both a satire on the absurd attempts to make everyone the same and to disregard the important differences between us, and a story which rejects the human impulse to use one’s innate sense of superiority (whether real or merely assumed) in order to gain power over other people.

In this regard, Diane Moon Glampers is the villain of the story for seeking to impose equity on everyone using totalitarian force, but Harrison Bergeron himself is also a warning about what may happen if individuals are allowed to use their innate privileges for evil or depraved ends.

At the same time as it is a warning against enforced equity (i.e., everyone will be as mediocre as everyone else), the story also carries the seeds of an opposing message, namely that those who seek to enforce difference and to use their innate differences from others to attain power and privilege are also to be rejected and opposed.

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Harrison Bergeron Themes Analysis

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Published: Jun 14, 2024

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Table of contents

The use of handicaps, the portrayal of the media, the character of harrison.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron

Analysis of Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 25, 2021

Kurt Vonnegut is celebrated more for his longer fiction than for his short stories. Nonetheless, Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” originally published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science in October 1961, and currently available in the author’s collection, Welcome to the Monkey House , is a very popular short story and is often cited as an example of dystopian science fiction with an emphasis on egalitarianism. One segment of the 1972 teleplay Between Time and Timbuktu was based on the story, and it was later adapted into a TV movie, Harrison Bergeron (1995), with Sean Astin in the title role.

Set in 2081, the story depicts society’s vain search for absolute equality. Specifically, this new world does not attempt to raise standards for the disabled or handicapped but rather chooses to implement a more onerous solution: to impede those who have superior intellect, beauty, or strength. This solution deprives individuals of their talents by employing masks, loud noises, and weights in an attempt to level the playing field for the less talented. Actually the government is attempting to place all members of society at the level of the lowest common denominator, a process that is overseen by the United States Handicapper General, the shotgun-toting Diana Moon Glampers, whose primary goal is to rid society of anyone who might threaten mediocrity and inadequacy. A similar (though less developed) version of this character and idea appeared in Vonnegut’s earlier novel, The Sirens of Titan.

In this brave new world, the exceptional are consistently repressed, arrested, thrown into mental institutions, and ultimately killed for failing to be average. The central and title character, Harrison Bergeron, is, of course, a threat to this community since he is physically fit, handsome, intellectual, and, what is worse, rebellious. As a result, he is forced to bear enormous handicaps. These include distracting noises, 300- pounds of excess weight, eyeglasses to give him headaches, and cosmetic changes to make him ugly. Despite these handicaps, however, he is able to invade a TV station and declare himself the new emperor. He then strips himself of his handicaps and begins to dance with a ballerina whose amazing beauty and skills have also been distorted by the authoritarian government in an attempt to restrict her advancement and recognition as a superior individual. As the couple dance in defiance of the “rules,” the two defy gravity as they “kiss” the ceiling and assert their artistic independence as well as their refusal to be controlled by an outside authority. The story ends abruptly with two shotgun blasts, suggesting to the reader that there is no forgiveness for those who defy society’s demand for conformity to the ordinary. Added poignancy is created by the framing story, in which Bergeron’s parents are watching TV and observe their son’s demise but cannot concentrate enough to remember the incident or assess its importance. Vonnegut’s point seems to be that without the nonconformists, the dreamers, and the different, society is doomed. The good intention of equality is marred by the way society decides to maintain it. To be fair to one group, it must necessarily be unfair to another. Yet if the brilliant and talented are hindered, society will be unable to improve, and the status quo will be all it can hope for.

Kurt Vonnegut/The New York Times

Vonnegut’s more pessimistic view of life may be termed absurdist. In this future society, growth and experimentation are no longer fostered, and science and technologies are devised to hurt rather than to help humankind. The complacency of Harrison’s parents who witness his murder and yet cannot remember why they are so sad indicates they both have submitted to a world where rebellion is not tolerated and where sameness is fostered and encouraged.

While many critics have considered Vonnegut’s story as an attack on the attempt to level all individuals, what Vonnegut is really assailing is the public’s understanding of what that leveling entails. Critics like Roy Townsend and Stanley Shatt seem to have missed the underlying irony of “Bergeron,” as well as its unreliable narrator, preferring to stress the obvious and ignore the fact that the story line offers an assessment of the foolishness that is “common sense.” Common sense is shown to be ridiculous in its assumptions about equality and in its belief that a sense of morality and ethics is intuitive. Moreover, since Vonnegut’s politics were Leftist in nature, it is unlikely that he would attack the concepts of communism and socialism.

In fact, it is Harrison himself who embodies the past oppression of a dominant culture, and readers should remember his desire is to be emperor, to reassert his superiority and the power it entitles him to wield. Instead Vonnegut seems to satirize society’s limited view of egalitarianism as only intelligence, looks, and athleticism. He never addresses income distribution (the separation between rich and poor) or class prejudice (the difference between the powerful and the powerless) even though both are signifcant issues for America. The mediocrity Vonnegut decries is not a result of the future but a continuation of past practices, an antiintellectualism that is depicted in Harrison’s parents, Hazel and George, whose ideas seem to be shaped by what they see on TV and little else. Controlled by a corrupt value system that says to ignore sad things and be satisfied with normality, it is their world that is condemned more than the world of Diana Moon Glampers. They have facilitated her rise to power with all the coldness and sterility that one might associate with the lunar goddess. Freedom is not the greatest good for the smallest number; nor does it hold that a classruled society will promulgate economic success. Though the story’s message appears quite simple, its moral is rather complex, forcing individual readers to think twice before they reduce its meaning to a sentence or two. Vonnegut was clearly not just trying to side with the radical Right’s objections to big government, and “Harrison Bergeron” is definite evidence of how his convoluted texts beg for more contemplation than they have been previously given

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Harrison Bergeron

Kurt vonnegut, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Equality vs. Individualism

In the futuristic world of “Harrison Bergeron,” the government applies physical and mental handicaps to individuals with above-average strength and intelligence in order to guarantee that all people in society are equal. While equality is often regarded as a positive condition of democratic society, Vonnegut’s dystopian portrayal of an absolutely equal society reveals how equality must be balanced with freedom and individualism in order for society to thrive.

Although in the story all people are…

Media and Ideology

In “Harrison Bergeron,” the totalitarian state regulates the minds and bodies of its citizens to ensure statewide equality. In addition to distributing handicap devices to lower the physical and/or mental strength of above-average citizens, the government maintains equality among citizens through ideologically-charged media that encourages citizens to consent to the invasive practices of the US Handicapper General . By showing propaganda as an equally powerful and invasive force as grotesque physical devices, Vonnegut suggests that…

Dissent vs. Authority

For the brief moments when Harrison proclaims himself Emperor, destroys his state-issued handicaps , and dances beautifully on state TV, the government’s power is lost. Although the moment is short-lived (a government agent shoots Harrison dead while he’s dancing), his dissent nonetheless shows that individuals might still have power under totalitarianism. Harrison’s exceptional existence proves that equality isn’t absolute (or else he wouldn’t have been able to achieve such an extraordinary feat), and therefore that…

The Power of the Arts

Though state media insists that Harrison has plans to overthrow the government, his act of rebellion is not a traditional coup: he dances beautifully on national TV with a ballerina whom he has liberated from her handicaps , to music from an orchestra he has also un-handicapped. In other words, Harrison’s dissent is an artistic performance unencumbered by forced equality, which suggests that artists can disrupt state authority through the power of performance.

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An Analysis “Harrison Bergeron” Essay

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Equality is a concept which has become exceptionally prominent in recent years and is now regarded as a topical issue both in the United States and worldwide. The short story “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut describes a dystopian world where people have achieved true equality. Despite the fact that the author tries to portray an equal society, it is discriminatory since it ensures equality through suppression of citizens’ rights, while the current American society espouses the equality of opportunity.

“Harrison Bergeron” is set in 2081, which highlights Vonnegut’s intention to show the reader how society would evolve in a century. The short story depicts the United States, where new amendments guarantee that no one can be in any way better than others (Vonnegut, 2017). As a result, people who excel in a certain sphere or possess qualities which can be considered above average have to intentionally curtail their abilities.

It clear that such a society is not equal because it does not let people realize their potential fully. For instance, dancers who could deliver superior performance had to wear sash weights and mask their faces in order to conceal their elegant movements and beautiful faces (Vonnegut, 2017). Harrison Bergeron’s world is different from ours because it imposes absolute equality, which ultimately eliminates individual freedom.

Modern society promotes the equality of opportunity, which means that all individuals are treated the same way regardless of their religion, sex, or ethnicity. For example, the Black Lives Movement is working towards attaining equality among all races in terms of the criminal justice system treatment. Personally, I would not want to live in Harrison Bergeron’s world because, in it, my personal rights would not be respected, and my life would be dependent on the state and its actions.

The short story “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut allows the reader to get an insight into the aspects of society which embraced total equality. Such a society puts people with talents and abilities at a disadvantage since they have to hide and hamper their qualities. Modern society espouses a different path, the one which is based on the equality of opportunity and respect for the personal rights of citizens.

Vonnegut, K. (2017). Complete stories . Seven Stories Press.

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Harrison Bergeron - Free Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

Harrison Bergeron is a satirical dystopian short story by Kurt Vonnegut that explores themes of equality, government control, and the suppression of individual excellence. Essays on this topic might delve into the analysis of its themes, Vonnegut’s satirical style, or the societal critiques embedded within the narrative. Comparing this work to other dystopian literature or analyzing its relevance to contemporary discussions on equality and individualism can offer a rich literary and sociopolitical exploration. We have collected a large number of free essay examples about Harrison Bergeron you can find in Papersowl database. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

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• "Mother to Son" by Langston Hughes

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