Forced Equality
Forced Equality
In “Harrison Bergeron”, Kurt Vonnegut explores the theme of forced equality in American society in the future. Vonnegut creates a world in which all living people are equal in all ways. He focuses on creating equality by altering beauty, strength, and intelligence as opposed to dealing with race, religion, and sex, the true issues of equality in society. Although Vonnegut writes this story to teach the lesson that all people are not equal, he forces equality on America in the areas of beauty, strength, and intelligence.
Vonnegut creates a world in which beautiful people wear masks to cover their faces and strong individuals carry weights to make them equal to the weaker population. For the intelligent men and women, headsets that blast random noises are worn to interfere with intellectual thoughts. These handicaps are to be worn at all times and are enforced by law to equalize all human beings. If a handicap law is broken, the Handicapper General, who wears no handicaps and carries a shotgun, hunts down the guilty party and kills him. Similar to our society today, any rules or laws set by the government are to be followed or consequences will occur. Although our Government does not have a Handicap General like in Vonnegut’s story to hunt us down and kill us, our government does have other ways to punish us for breaking laws or in a sense controlling us. Monetary fines, citations, taxation, jail and or prison time are a few of the consequences the government forces on us.
Vonnegut’s form of forced equality will be questioned by the handicapped many times and will eventually fail. He uses Harrison in the story to show that people will protest and work against the handicaps until the handicap system is abolished. In our society today we have a similar mentality to protest when we feel a certain object is being forced down on us from the government. Many times protests do not always have the outcome we hope but it is a way to show the government we
In “Harrison Bergeron”, Kurt Vonnegut explores the theme of forced equality in American society in the future. Vonnegut creates a world in which all living people are equal in all ways. He focuses on creating equality by altering beauty, strength, and intelligence as opposed to dealing with race, religion, and sex, the true issues of equality in society. Although Vonnegut writes this story to teach the lesson that all people are not equal, he forces equality on America in the areas of beauty, strength, and intelligence.
Vonnegut creates a world in which beautiful people wear masks to cover their faces and strong individuals carry weights to make them equal to the weaker population. For the intelligent men and women, headsets that blast random noises are worn to interfere with intellectual thoughts. These handicaps are to be worn at all times and are enforced by law to equalize all human beings. If a handicap law is broken, the Handicapper General, who wears no handicaps and carries a shotgun, hunts down the guilty party and kills him. Similar to our society today, any rules or laws set by the government are to be followed or consequences will occur. Although our Government does not have a Handicap General like in Vonnegut’s story to hunt us down and kill us, our government does have other ways to punish us for breaking laws or in a sense controlling us. Monetary fines, citations, taxation, jail and or prison time are a few of the consequences the government forces on us.
Vonnegut’s form of forced equality will be questioned by the handicapped many times and will eventually fail. He uses Harrison in the story to show that people will protest and work against the handicaps until the handicap system is abolished. In our society today we have a similar mentality to protest when we feel a certain object is being forced down on us from the government. Many times protests do not always have the outcome we hope but it is a way to show the government we