Themes And Symbols In Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron

If a million different people read the same story, it would not be surprising to have a million different interpretations. The way the authors uses and places elements such as symbols, and motifs in the story has a lot to do with how the reader will interpret it. In some stories like The Tortoise and The Hare, the point the author is trying to make is crystal clear. Often time the author does not make the point obvious so that the reader can make their conclusion on what the message of the story is. In Harrison Bergeron, Kurt Vonnegut tells a lively story with debatable meaning by the creative use of seemingly simple characters, themes, motif’s and symbols.

Vonnegut was born on November 11, 1922. He discovered his love of writing early as

Lexi Stuckey states this was meant to serves as a “be content in your mediocrity” platform (88). Hazel wears no handicaps, but wishes she could be the Handicap General. This is ironic because the Handicap General would later shoot down and kill her son. When the television screen shows a performance of the ballerinas, Hazel cheers them on and brags about how average they are. When the television announcer can not get out a full sentence, she brags about how hard he is trying. In her mind, as long as you are trying you are succeeding. Here Vonnegut shares his feelings on cheering on the average. Once in a letter he stated “I can’t be sure, but there is a possibility that my story Harrison Bergeron is about the envy and self-pity I felt in an over-achiever’s high school” (Stuckey 88). Vonnegut’s feeling about high school and academic competition creped through this story to create an extreme

First, the theme of equality is the main focuses of the story. From beginning to end, the whole backbone of the story is represented by one idea: total equality among people. However, this theme does not necessarily lead to the interpretation of the story. The second theme in the story is mass communication. During the entire story, George and Hazel watch their son Harrison rise to freedom, and fall to fatal consequences all through a television screen. During the time that Vonnegut wrote this story, the power of television and mass communication was just taking off. The fact that the family’s main pass time was watching television shows that Vonnegut was worried that the American people would be hindered by this. Benjamin Reed states that the purpose of Harrison Bergeron is about “how consumerist media and the technology of mass communication have conspired to divest us of the higher functionality of of our minds” (46.) Based off of Reed’s statement he believes that the story was trying to warn the American people that technology will stop critical