...“At the Twilight's last gleaming…For the land of the free,” these are lyrics, written by Francis Scott Key when he was overcome by the feeling of freedom. Though in society now, that is just the opposite. Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. show exactly that, with putting handicaps on everyone to try to make everyone equal. Harrison Bergeron, and fourteen year old, breaks out of jail to show everyone who he really is on live television. A possible theme for Harrison Bergeron is, everyone is beautiful in their own ways, and should be allowed to express them, however, another possible theme may be, life is not fair, deal with it. Harrison Bergeron’s society is broken. The government makes everyone think and act as though everyone is equal....
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...Kurt Vonnegut's 1961 short story Harrison Bergeron takes place in the dystopian future of 2081. The 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the United States Constitution make every American totally equal, with no differences in intelligence, attractiveness, strength, or speed. Americans live in a world where “Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.” These laws are enforced by a particularly Orwellian-sounding officer called the Handicapper General. Harrison Bergeron, the fourteen-year-old titular character, is taken away from his parents. Due to their average intelligence, his parents, George and Hazel, are not fully aware of the tragic events. (In 2081,...
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...Fairness is Not What it Seems Kurt Vonnegut's futuristic story “Harrison Bergeron” takes place in the year 2081 and everyone is equal in intelligence, beauty and ability. But one boy named Harrison Bergeron does not like this equality, because many citizens including him have handicaps, limiting their physical and mental abilities. Harrison is a very intelligent person. His parents are watching a ballet performance, and Harrison decides to make his move and protest the handicaps at the performance, but unfortunately it only ends with Harrison dead and no change occurs. One lesson that this story teaches is that equality is not always equal. In the beginning of the story, it starts with George and Hazel, Harrison’s parents watching a ballet performance on their TV. George thought the dancers on TV were graceful-enough. They had handicaps, bags with weights in them, so it made it difficult to dance. Some of the dancers also had ear-piece handicaps, which screeched in their ears when they thought a bad thought. George did not like that dancers had handicaps.. “George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t have handicaps. But, he didn’t get very far with it before another noise ear scattered his thoughts.” This metaphor...
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...The theme of Harrison Bergeron is, “People can use their differences for the better.” This is the theme because everybody in the story is, “equal”, but they can’t make everybody equal genetically. So their way of making people, “equal”, they make the good looking people wear masks, they make smart people wear earpieces that make loud noises every 20 seconds, strong people had to wear heavy weights around their neck, etc. This is their way of making people equal. They are trying to hide everybody from bad things that happen in life. If they don’t see other people being better than them, they won’t want to better themselves because there is no reason to better themselves if they don’t need to do so. In the third paragraph, the story reads, “And George, while his intelligence was way above normal,...
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...Works by Kurt Vonnegut. Welcome to the Monkey House: A Collection of Short Works consists of 25 short stories most of which had previously appeared in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, Ladies Home Journal, Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine, Collier’s Magazine, Saturday Evening Post, The New York Times, Esquire, Venture, and Cosmopolitan. The title story appeared in Playboy magazine the same year the collection was released. Eleven of the stories were reprinted from Vonnegut’s 1961 short story collection Canary in a Cat House (Vonnegut). This paper will focus on four futuristic science fiction stories from the collection. These stories, “Welcome to the Monkey House”, “Harrison Bergeron”, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”, and “Unready to Wear” all share a dystopian science fiction theme. Science and technology are supposed to make the world a better place, but instead, Vonnegut concludes they only create a new set of problems (Farrell, “Science and Technology in the Works of Kurt Vonnegut”). Television is often a target of satire in much of his fiction from the 1950’s. He describes it as desensitizing and numbing while deceiving the masses (Werlock). Vonnegut uses satire and pessimism throughout these dystopian stories. Satire is a special form of literature that seeks to uncover ridiculous ideas and customs in a society (Mowery). Each story portrays a totalitarian government that proposes an irrational solution to genuine problems. Vonnegut uses dystopian fiction...
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...ft ceiling above you. But then, the Handicapper General rushes in and ruins your fun by shooting and killing you and your empress. This is what happens to Harrison Bergeron. He wanted freedom, but he had to pay the price of death. In this story, “Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.” Harrison’s parents are watching television and they see Harrison trying to overturn the government. The Handicapper General rushes in and kills him because he wanted to let everyone free. This story shows that freedom is what people want but sometimes it takes risks to get freedom. One of the biggest themes in Harrison Bergeron is the idea of freedom. On page 3, Hanzel is trying to convince George to take some of the lead balls out of his handicap bag because how tired he always is. “If you could just take a few out when you came home from work…” This shows us that George makes it seem that he is already free, even though he has all the handicaps. He makes it seem like we are...
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...A Reflection on Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut Introduction Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s short story, Harrison Bergeron, is about control. The setting is based in future America, where everyone is forced to be equal. Harrison, the main character, breaks the law as the country watches on TV. The story begins by mentioning Amendments 211 through 213, making the reader aware of limitations that could potentially be placed on their freedom. In this story of perception, government agents are the deciding factor of a person’s fate and they ensure that laws are enforced. Beautiful people must wear hideous masks to make them equal to the ugly, the brilliant wear ear devices that alter their thought process and make recollection near impossible and the strong wear weighted bags to make them equal to those who are weak (Vonnegut, 1961). Forced equality is questioned by the handicapped and the outcome is a controlled society. Harrison is used to represent the people who will protest against such laws and encourage others to support his cause. The central idea is that the government could never make a perfect world by enforcing total equality but they can place limitations on people. Discussion Vonnegut uses a satirical and humorous tone while presenting a serious topic to critique America in the 1960’s, both politically and socially. The political system in the story is egalitarianism; this is the belief that all people should be treated equally in every...
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...Being Different is Unique Harrison Bergeron is a short story and a movie based on a dystopia in 2053 where the government tries to make everyone equal by giving people handicaps to make everyone the same. The message that Harrison Bergeron puts out is that being different makes people unique. The characters from the movie and short story, Harrison and Phillipa help develop the theme. Harrison is different between the short story and the movie. Harrison in the book is locked up in prison, he's tall handsome and strong and in the movie he's a school student who is smarter than everyone, and that's not good. “He was exactly seven feet tall.” scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to...
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...American Intercontinental University Abstract James Baldwin and Kurt Vonnegut Jr were two eminent writers that marked American fiction literature after world war two. James Baldwin is the author of Sonny’s Blues published in early 1950 in New City. The story is narrated by unknown man who pertain his attempted to come to the damage with his long disaffected Brother Sonny, Jazz musician. In this work Baldwin absorbed many of his own experiences to search the issuances of racial conflict, individuality and the complexity of human needs. Similar to Sonny, Harrison Bergeron, written by Kurt Vonnegut Jr is a fourteen year boy who rebels against his tyrannical government. Vonnegut used a satirical humoristic commentary of society and its leaders as James used the lightness and darkness symbols to describe his suffering characters. The question is how the author literacy styles differ or similar to one another in term of themes? The Comparison-Contrast Essay Sonny’s Blues written by James is a story that addresses with very expression of the society and is done so through symbolism and imagery. Baldwin’s story is carefully written using lightness and darkness as typifies through out the entire story, he focuses of “Sonny’s Blues” on the character of sonny who eventually and endlessly fighting to find what makes him happy. Finally Sonny finds two breaks loose, one of them disastrous drug abuse and musician Baldwin’s story is centered on two brothers at different stage of their...
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...with science fiction short stories and novels. One of the most famous his work is “Harrison Bergeron” It is a fantasy with elements of science fiction. Vonnegut shows us America in 2081 where all people are mentally, physically, and socially equal. He focuses on everyone is equal in beauty, strength, religion, and sex. In the exposition everything surprise us – 2081 year, everybody is equal and rather unusual family - George and Hazel Bergeron, two people whose son, Harrison, has been arrested by the government. They are watching ballet and don’t mind about it. Things start getting interesting and the rising action starts when Hazel starts think about the changes in the world. Then suddenly ballet was interrupted for a new bulletin. The ballerina says that Harrison Bergeron, 14 years old boy (who is Georg and Hazel’s son) escaped from the prison. The highest point of action is when Harrison appeared in his few moments of freedom; he takes a ballerina as his Empress, frees her from her mask, and defies gravity by flying into the air and kissing the ceiling of the auditorium. But after it he was dead by the Handicapper General. We understand the resolution of the story when everything's back to normal. We see that for George and Hazel, nothing actually happened. The story is written for mass-readers. Here is showed the conflict man vs man. For this excellent short story, the key theme is how human freedom has been curtailed in order to achieve true equality in...
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...The most noteworthy section of Harrison Bergeron is the first paragraph because the author utilizes his language to develop a theme and cleverly deliver a satire on Communism. To begin with, the noted section has the strongest writing because the writer includes extreme words to establish a recurring idea. In the first paragraph, where the readers second-handedly explore this “utopian” society for the first time, the first impressions that they get of the place are strict control and absolute sameness . Such impressions are conveyed through extreme words like “every” and “nobody”, stressing how everyone is “equal” in the community, in so creating an important theme that deals with “equality”. Therefore, the writing here is outstanding because...
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...stories are still being written in today’s societies that follow the elements of Aristotelian theory. One story written in relatively recent history is that of "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. which in many aspects, can be considered a Aristotelian tragedy. Aristotle described a tragedy as a story that consisted of a tragic hero and a plot that would generate fear and pity in its audience. In this story, fourteen-year-old Harrison Bergeron valiantly attempts to break free from an equality-based society, but is quickly denied by the authoritative force of the government. The most important element in Aristotelian tragedy is the plot of a story. Aristotle states in Poetics that a story must consist of a beginning, middle, and end (Aristotle, 7). "Harrison Bergeron" fits this description very well because the beginning, middle, and end can be clearly identified while reading the story. The story opens by giving a description of what the society people live in is like. "THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way" (1). By reading this description of what life was like, one gets the idea that people lived in a totalitarian-based society. As the story progresses, the reader is introduced to Hazel and George Bergeron, who are watching a ballet program on their television when a special news bulletin...
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...In the short story “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut, George Bergeron and his wife, Hazel Bergeron, live in a society in 2081 that, thanks to new amendments and the Handicapper General, is, completely and altogether, equal in every single way. Every citizen was made sure to have the same level of beauty, strength, speed, and mental capability through the use of handicaps, such as a mental handicap that emits a loud noise every twenty seconds or a canvas bag padlocked around a person’s neck carrying varying weights of birdshot. George wore strength and mental handicaps, but Hazel had none. However, their son, Harrison Bergeron, handicapped to the maximum, wearing the bags of birdshot as well as a large assortment of scrap metal and headphones...
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...a society that does not accept different. But what if one disobeys the rules our society created for us to follows? Anyone who dares to disobey these norms are looked down upon, shunned, they are seen as a threat and more likely than not sent to a facility to control such behaviors. These types of behaviors are seen as deviant, to be deviant according to the readings is “actions or behaviors that violate cultural norms, including formally and informal violations of social norms” (reading). This theme of deviance is carried out in “The Pedestrian” by Ray Bradbury, “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner and “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut all three have a deviant character. All three short stories have three main concepts that define the term deviant and ties one or another together, rebelling against authority, isolation, and individuality. Those who rebel against authority are seen by our society as a “danger to the public”, much like in “The Pedestrian” and “Harrison Bergeron” who both characters solely go against authority. In “The Pedestrian”, a man walks in shadows of night in 2053 A.D. A time where everyone is sheltered in the comfort of their homes, watching television and keeping to themselves. In the short story, no one was ever out past dark, except for Mr. Leonard Mead who disobeys the norm and takes a stroll to clear his mind and find peace. In this society, all those who are out, are seen as different, they are seen as rebelling against the authority. Mr. Mead...
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...Equality and Manipulation: Theme in “Harrison Bergeron” The dystopian story, “Harrison Bergeron,” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., is set in 2081 America, where three amendments to the Constitution make everyone equal in every way. No one is smarter, stronger, or better looking than anyone else. Some people are perfectly average and don’t need handicaps, like Hazel. On the other hand, her husband, George, has to wear a mental and physical handicap. Everyone is required, by law, to be equal. However, their son, Harrison, is so far from average and so powerful, that they have to lock him up in prison. Harrison wants to overthrow the government. He realized that this “equality” was taking away everyone’s individuality and it wasn’t really equality anymore. A lesson that shines through this story is that equality can only go so far...
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