47 pages • 1 hour read
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.Harrison Bergeron
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1960A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Literary Devices
Black Humor
Black humor uses comedy to discuss serious or taboo subjects. The narrator notes that “April, for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away” (18). The juxtaposition of the weather to Harrison’s abduction suggests that the incident is not taken seriously enough.
Vonnegut uses the device throughout the story. After George forms a thought and soon hears a “twenty-one-gun salute in his head,” Hazel comments, “that was a doozy” (21) Calling his torture “a doozy” makes it seem that this horrible incident is commonplace; it also understates the severity of the issue, as the “salute” is potent enough that it leaves George trembling with tears in his eyes.
Dystopia
A dystopia is a vision of a society in cataclysmic decline; it is the inversion of a utopia. “Harrison Bergeron” presents a future in which the government takes away 14-year-old children from their parents, imposes handicaps on citizens, and threatens fines or jail for anybody who disobeys. Vonnegut’s thought experiment shows that, if the government is to enforce equality, the word “equality” must be properly understood, otherwise it can justify oppression. Vonnegut takes this idea to the extreme and envisions a dystopia of tyrannical equality. It is a political dystopia because those who hold power are oppressive. It becomes bleaker when the person who contests that power, Harrison, is also oppressive.
Allegory
An allegory is a story that has veiled moral or political significance. In “Harrison Bergeron,” George and Hazel’s mindless television watching correlates to watching television in the real world. Television is not just a tool of the Handicapper General to stop George and Hazel from thinking, it is also a tool of real governments to stop their citizens from thinking. The same is true for violence. Excellence threatens the ideal of equality at the root of democratic institutions. The extreme violence in “Harrison Bergeron” exaggerates the steps that real governments take to enforce equality and uniformity among their diverse citizens. Although the story is a work of fiction, it is critical of politics in the real world.
Journalistic Style
The story is narrated in simple English. The sentences are short. The vocabulary is never overly scientific or legalistic. Although the story is speculative and poses difficult political and moral questions, the style makes it accessible. Vonnegut’s journalistic style also gives the story a feeling of reality. Although the story is science fiction set in the year 2081, the language resembles that of a newscast, making the narrative feels realistic and pertinent. Vonnegut’s style makes the dystopian scenarios in “Harrison Bergeron” seem all too possible.
Related Titles
By Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
