Equality In Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron

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Imagine a world that everyone was equal, people would see eye to eye and no one would have a disagreement. That would sound amazing, but Kurt Vonnegut’s short story shows a different view of equality. Kurt Vonnegut’s shorty story Harrison Bergeron was first published on October 1961 in the issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. By the 1980’s “Harrison Bergeron was reprinted in High schools and colleges. This shorty story didn’t become really popular until Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House came out. Even when this released, the story had both negative and positive reviews. Not a lot of people were fans of the thought of everyone being equal because at the time discrimination was big and being separate was the way to go. Harrison …show more content…

The sad thing is that George and Hazel have no idea of what is going on. Hazel can’t keep a thought due to her average intelligence and George can’t understand what is happening because the noise that is on his headset distracts him. One day Hazel and George are watching dancers on the tv and Hazel begins to cry but cant remember why. They noth start talking abut the dsancers who have weighs on them and masks to cover their beauty. While George is watching a noise goes off and hazel mentions about what she would do if she were the handicapper …show more content…

In the 1960’s The Civil Rights Movement was occurring which had begun in the late 1940’s. Equality had made its first appearance in the armed services when President Truman signed the Executive Order 9981 which abolished racial discrimination in the United States resulting in the end of segregation in the services. Then the fight for equality moved into public schools on May 17, 1954 the Supreme Court agreed that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Soon after the fight for equality moved into the local towns. An African-American woman named Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat at the front of the "colored section" of a bus to a white passenger. Her arrest resulted in a black community launching a bus boycott, which lasted for more than a year, until December 21 1956 when the buses become desegregated. In Harrison Bergeron everyone had the same intelligence and if anyone was smarter they would have to have handicaps. In a way this seems to relate with what was happening in the 1960’s. The way. It could be because the whites were afraid and did think that having equality was going to look like society in Harrison

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