Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron

In the arguably famous short science fiction story “Harrison Bergeron”, written by Kurt Vonnegut in the year of 1961, the dystopian future world taunts the pursuit of absolute equality and the unfairness people ignored in the process of doing so in an absurd way.

Science fiction gives the author, by allowing them building a whole new world with no boundaries – but similar with the real world in some ways, an ability of magnifying social problems and showing them more clearly to readers. The author set up a world at the very beginning: “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal… They were equal every which way… All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th and 213th amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents

of the United States Handicapper General” (1).

By stating that the time of the story, Vonnegut created, with the unique power of science fiction, a sense of discrete, which prevents reader to relate the real world too strongly to accept the strangeness and fallaciousness of tweaks he made to the world. A persuasive setting of the world is the very fundamental step of successfully revealing social problems to readers because readers will not believe the story, no matter how lifelike are the characters and how logical are the actions of them, if the setting and background cannot be believed. The usage of terms like “amendments to the Constitution” and “Handicapper General” that are familiar to readers not only brings sincerity and authenticity to the fictional world, but also shows Vonnegut still wanted readers to realize the fact that the world he described, being farcical and insane as is, could potentially be their future home. This world is far from normal. It may seem ideal that everybody is equal as he claimed in the very beginning, yet things rapidly turn around and start to look illogical when the equality was described as an absolute unification of all characteristics of all human being. No one is better, or no one can be better, than perfect average. Average is, by its definition, very common in

real daily life, so Vonnegut went one step further and stated that “The perfect intelligence means one can only think in short bursts (page 1); the average voice means speaking in grackle squawk (page 3) and the perfect music sounds cheap, silly and false (page 5)”. Statements and settings like this magnify the unreasonableness and unfairness of forcing everyone to behave averagely, thus make it easier for readers to fully understand the fallacy behind the concept of absolute equality.
Dystopian science fiction, being a subgenre of science fiction, usually creates a world that is the “no good place”, which allows the author to push the world to a more extreme level at which the absurdity become more significant.

There is, almost, always a central entity with unprecedented power in dystopian fiction, here in Harrison Bergeron, the “Handicapper General” is the power, or at least a fraction of it. HG men were described by Vonnegut as cold-blooded killers. “It was then that Diana Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun.” Vonnegut wrote, “She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor” (page 5). The extreme cruelness of the power will lead readers to rethink not only the concept of the absolute equality but also the relationship of ends and means. Although the extremeness in the dystopian fiction is not common in real life, the world of sci-fi, as stated before, is just similar to it enough. Questions will be thrown while readers witness the ongoing violence: Do we know what we’re talking about when we say “equal”? Do the right ends justify the unfair, even violent means? Also, the tragic death of Harrison, as a rebellion, delivered a pessimistic and depressing picture. As the warrior trying to reveal the cover and fight against the power been killed cruelly, people would just “forget sad things” (page 6) like they “always do” (page 6) and go back to their numb and

absolute equal life. In a way, words from Vonnegut showed his genius yet somewhat terrifying prediction of the society being flooded by information and ongoing event that people can no longer pay attention to any specific event. Readers will connect the fact that Hazal and George forget things so fast with the real life and Vonnegut has succeeded the writing by triggering readers’ thought.