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Equal Society In Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron

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The United States is known for being the country with freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to express who you are and show your talent. Also, everyone is treated “equal” here in the United States. Vonnegut in this story informs readers what if everyone was treated extremely equal. Like same amount of talent, everyone is the same intelligence wise etc…Here is how Vonnegut is telling us about a completely equal society. To begin with, Vonnegut uses word choice and characterization on talking about what if the society was truly equal by talking about George Bergeron. George Bergeron is a very intelligent who has to have a transmitter in his head that goes off every 40 seconds. He tries to think hard about something but every …show more content…

He makes Hazel this person who can’t really think a lot about one particular thing for a while her mind sort of forgets quickly. Like for example when she was watching TV and she sees her son get killed/shot and she starts to cry but doesn’t remember why she is crying to begin with. George asked her if she was crying and she just replied with a casual “Yup”(26). Lastly, another character Vonnegut created was Harrison Bergeron who was the rebel of the society. He made Harrison seem like the most powerful person ever. .Harrison stated in the story "I am the emperor ".In the story Harrison started to dance with the dancers on stage and the government started to have enough of him so they shot him in the middle of the performance on television. Harrison just wanted to be "different" and the government didn’t like anyone being different or better so they killed him. In conclusion, Vonnegut used many different ways of characterization and word choice to write and explain this story on what if everyone was completely equal.

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