Harrison Bergeron (1961). Content and Description

“Harrison Bergeron” was first published in the October 1961 issue of the Magazine ofFantasy and Science Fiction. Vonnegut’s third publication in a science fiction magazine, the story is set in a future dystopian society where the government imposes restraints to equalize all members of the society.

Those who are not equal—those who are not “normal,” which for the story means “perfectly average”—receive grotesque handicaps: hideous masks, clown noses, thick glasses, headsets that disrupt thinking with jarring sounds, and “sashweights and bags of birdshot” to impair movement. Instituted by constitutional amendments, egalitarian laws are enforced by “the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General,” or (Diana Moon Glampers), who strangely resembles Harrison’s “perfectly average” mother, and the “H-G men” (an obvious play on G-men, the 1940s and 1950s slang term for Federal Bureau of Investigation and Secret Service agents, also known as “government men”), who lead the “abnormal” 14-year-old Harrison Bergeron away in the clammy month of April. Unlike Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in which April’s showers bring new life and the hope for renewal, everything in Harrison’s world, including the heralding of spring, is portrayed as a grotesque nightmare.

As the story opens, Harrison Bergeron, the genius, an athletic, good-looking boy of 14, has been taken away by the H-G men because he poses a threat to society. He is exceptional in every single way, the vision of excellence and perfection that the society has labored to control.

As in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Harlan Ellison’s “‘Repent Harlequin!’ Said the Tick- tock Man” (1965), Vonnegut’s police state squelches all forms of civil disobedience; all three stories form a commentary on the nature of power, corruption, and blindness that often ensues when the desire to build the perfect society is unchecked. In Vonnegut’s work the Handicapper General eradicates difference, denies individual rights, and sees freewill as antithetical to the common good: Society members are cogs in a wheel, all subjugating themselves to the needs of the whole.

Vonnegut’s ideal society resembles those in Plato’s Republic and Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), where a totalitarian government enforces the social code, guaranteeing a unified collective. Such a conformist society also mirrors the socialist and communist societies of the Soviet Union and China, who, at the time Vonnegut’s story was published, were seen as threats to the United States and to democratic institutions.

Because it is so masterfully constructed and the subject so thoroughly satirized, Vonnegut’s story can be seen as both a critique of communism itself and a commentary on the increasing paranoia over communism in the United States, the paranoia rampant after World War II that fueled the cold war, during which both the United States and the USSR stockpiled nuclear weapons and spent enormous amounts of money developing “military intelligence,” which, for Vonnegut, would be an oxymoronic term.

Similarly, the story also satirizes an American culture that devalues intellectualism while poking fun at those who challenge the status quo, for Harrison is an overachiever who questions authority and demands to be free of his handicaps. He speaks what no one else can or is willing to say. In this sense he is the novel’s protagonist, the one who propels the outrageous action at the end of the story, during which Harrison, after freeing the musicians of their handicaps, instructing them how to play the music correctly, and choosing one of the ballerinas as his empress, shows the world the meaning of the word dance.

Harrison not only defies constitutional amendments in his dancing, but also defies the laws of gravity as he kisses the ceiling, a fantastic moment that signals his breaking free of the adamantine chains that have bound him. Yet, Vonnegut’s art prevents the story from becoming a simple moral lesson or political allegory. While Harrison is a rebel of great intellect, Vonnegut does not present him as someone to emulate. Instead, Vonnegut fashions an antihero in Harrison Bergeron, a seven-foot-tall Adonis who is a megalomaniac, crying, “I am the Emperor! Everybody must do as I say at once!” as he stamps his foot on the stage.

Vonnegut achieves a great deal of ambiguity in this fantastic tale in which both the perpetrators of handicapping and those who rise above the handicaps imposed fall prey to Vonnegut’s satirical vision. Simultaneously a critique of institutions and thought systems that deny the individual expression, which do not admit intelligence, beauty, and grace, and a cautionary tale, rather than exalt the autonomous self, the story leaves room, with all of its ironies and careful juxtapositions, for the possibility of community. Thus, the story is at once comic and maudlin, optimistic and pessimistic, invested in individual freedom and cautious about the will of the individual left unchecked.

By seeing how much lies within Vonnegut’s satirical grasp, readers can begin to appreciate the nature of satire, the form that showcases human follies of all sorts. The story did not receive any critical attention, however, until 1968, when it appeared in Vonnegut’s collection Welcome to the Monkey House, a collection of 25 short stories written between 1950 and 1968. In a classic example of Vonnegut’s dark humor, Harrison’s parents are so enrapt with the television that they ultimately forget about the horrific death of their son, even though they have just seen it along with the rest of the news bulletin watchers.

Like the rest of their dystopian society, the Bergerons are automatons controlled by the government and pacified by an insipid form of entertainment, that, as do the handicaps parceled out to those with intelligence, numbs the mind and distracts anyone who might conjure a contrary thought, any idea differing from the norm. Interestingly, the story was reprinted on November 16, 1965, in National Review, the political conservative magazine edited by William F. Buckley, Jr.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Why is the first line of the story significant? What does it suggest? What does it establish?

2. What do the United States Handicapper General agents do, and why do they do it? What threats to society do they target? What present circumstances in our society could lead to such absurdities?

3. What actual developments, policies, or trends does Vonnegut parody in the story?

4. Why is Harrison Bergeron such a threat to society? How has he been “handicapped”?

5. What is the significance of the dance that Harrison performs with the ballerina?

6. “Harrison Bergeron,” Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and Ayn Rand’s Anthem (1938) deal with conformist societies in which the government polices “equality.” First, compare the techniques the government uses in Bradbury’s and Rand’s texts. What are the consequences of creating “equal” societies in both works?