Harrison Bergeron

Harrison Bergeron

The theme of absolute equality has already appeared two years before "Harrison Bergeron" was published for the first time in Fantasy and Science-Fiction Magazine (1961). It was Vonnegut's novel The Sirens of Titan. However, in this work the

theme is only a minor feature and is not really developed (see Vonnegut 1975:158). The idea probably intrigued Kurt Vonnegut and forced him to develop it into a short story. Those who are familiar with Kurt Vonnegut's writing will certainly recognize

some other themes of this story. For example the fear of de-humanization of human beings, being stuck in amber (Harrisons inability to overthrow the system) and so forth.

In "Harrison Bergeron", Kurt Vonnegut presented a scary view of a future society, where everyone was equal. "Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else." (Vonnegut 1988:7). It was the job of the agents of the United States Handicapper General to keep it this way. Beautiful people had to wear ugly masks. People not heavy enough had to wear handicap bags full of lead. Clever people had to wear a radio in their ear tuned to the government transmitter, which sent out sharp noises to keep people from taking advantage of their brains. It was a world where competition was the greatest of sins.

I think that this view can be very easily related to modern society. People are striving for equality of some kind--equality of races, sexes etc. People try to eliminate racism, sexism, lookism, ableism, ageism. Even the word speciesism starts to appear in modern dictionaries of Politically Correct language. The society in "Harrison Bergeron" succeeded in eliminating these prejudices--everybody got the same opportunity to do anything--and the result was fatal.

When the power got into the hands of stupid people unfit for governing the country, they had to find a way to protect their position. So they came with the idea of handicaps, which brought all the above-average people and the average people to the level of the below-average ones. Thus, their position of power was

preserved. The result was that people lost their individuality, lost their humanity.

Theodore Sturgeon's novel Godbody deals with a problem seemingly distant from this, yet I think it is very similar. It deals with human sexuality and nakedness. In the introduction to this book, Robert A. Heinlein said:

"God must love skin since he makes so much of it.

Covering it with cloth or leather or fur in the name of

'decency'