Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron

Everyone needs to know the people that are around them to recognize differences between them and other people. In the short story “Harrison Bergeron,” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., equality is a big deal. George and Hazel Bergeron’s son Harrison was taken away from them when he was young. While watching the television an older Harrison comes on the screen, expressing his repulsion for equality. The government is using handicaps to make everyone equal, which he proceeds to take off. The Handicapper General who enforces this law then kills Harrison along with a companion of his, and George witnesses this. Reflecting on it later, George Bergeron cannot remember why he was so sad to see Harrison die. Throughout this story, Vonnegut uses imagery and vivid …show more content…
For instance, in the beginning of the story, Vonnegut writes, “They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.” Right away the reader finds out about the character that George. Vonnegut wrote about George’s thoughts and his actions. Because of this, we can learn more about the character and use that as a base to know why he made certain choices. By describing what the characters were doing, we learned more about the characters themselves. The author wants for us to think like George does. This is an important part of the story because it was showing how people who were more intelligent like George compared to people less …show more content…
This is how the scene went, “The rest of Harrison’s appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.” By describing Harrison, the reader learns more about him as a character and the decision that he makes to go against the government reflects what was learned about him. Another thing that is eminent is that he was smarter and stronger than most people because of the handicaps that he wore. The reader could picture Harrison and what problem was occurring. Introducing the characters through descriptions helped the story as a whole and helped the reader to understand the