Harrison Bergeron Literary Analysis

A utopian society is generalized as a world where everything is perfect to near-perfect with little room for flaws or errors. The polar opposite however, a dystopian society, is a society where everything from freedom and justice has completely become irrelevant, where everything is undesirable and frightening. One source that will be used is Kurt Vonnegut’s short story; Harrison Bergeron which has very contrasting themes depending on individual perspective. The thing with these societies is that more often than not,they are based around individual perspective. Much like journalism and overall modern media, perspectives will revolve around bias. It is that bias that settles the debate between the two societies commonly used in fictional novels,
Lois Lowry’s book, The Giver, fits into the thesis that dystopia and utopia are all dependent on perspective. The story takes place in a futuristic representation of the world where all knowledge of past wars, grief, rebellion and imbalance has been stored and only accessible to ‘The Giver’. Lying is forbidden and in retrospect, all citizens are equal. Family units are never bound by blood as sexual intercourse is also forbidden amongst the people in order to further encourage equality. Within the story, the normal, everyday citizens are in the illusion that their world is absolutely perfect as everything is tailored to fit into the visual representation of perfection. ‘The Giver’ is able to see past this, to see how humanity has lost its individuality and freedom of expression. The Giver is then given an apprentice, Jonas, who is also the main protagonist within the story. Jonas has internal conflicts throughout the progression of the story as the realization that the world once thought of as perfect and carefree was sugar coated to in order to hide the reality of lost culture and heritage that was intentionally thrown away in place of a generalization of equality and world peace. Jonas finds contradictions in the once thought-to-be utopian society that eventually is seen as dystopian in the eyes of the ‘The Giver’ and its