Single Paragraph Essay: Harrison Bergeron

A famous businessman Mark Hopkins once said "Religion without morality is a superstition and a curse, and morality without religion is impossible." Mark Hopkins suggests that without God and set goals, morals are not possible and cannot be achieved without a religious background. Therefore, both works lack God and morality, leaving the people involved to have no purpose in life. Throughout the short story "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut, unlawful and unjustly actions are taken by the corrupt government. People such as Harrison and George are being abused by the government in the name of equality.

Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th and 213th amendments of the constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General. (1) “Unceasing vigilance of agents” is a satire on government for transgressing its control over the citizens. It turns out to be a society in which the government curbs the individuality of citizens under the façade of ensuring equality. Stanley Schatt states: In any leveling process, what really is lost, according to Vonnegut, is beauty, grace, and wisdom.

The most common form of reality control present in both The Handmaid’s Tale and Nineteen Eighty-Four is the elimination of privacy. The extent of the government’s use of reality control over the handmaids alone completely affects their abilities to act on their own impulses and think for themselves because they are forbidden from forming relationships with other people in society. It also makes them extremely suspicious of not only each other, but everything around them. In Gilead, the women function as lower class citizens while “the males in Gilead serve mostly paramilitary functions: lower echelon guards called Angels and an elite corps called guardians who frequently double as spies or Eyes” as stated by Elisabeth Hansot in her journal article entitled “Selves, Survival and Resistance in The Handmaid’s Tale” (Hansot 57). The complex social system the government creates involves a sort of hierarchy where each individual has a specific duty in society.

Nevertheless, her reaction is inhumane and insensitive as she suggests "that one was a doozy"(pg. 65) because the parents can not see what unfair and cruel world they livers they view it as fair. Equality blinds Hazel and George, failing to comprehend they are being deprived of their freedom and individuality. Harrison attempts to overthrow the rule of the government but he never has the chance at unseating the government because the laws are too powerful. "Harrison Bergeron" captures achieving equality, if we give up individuality and freedom, which are two things people fight to acquire.

The United States of America is founded on equality. Our society fights for equality everyday. Fahrenheit 451 and the short story Harrison Bergeron both encompass equality to an unreasonable extent. The society of Fahrenheit 451 banned books in order to restrict the smarter people mentally and bring them down to the lowest level. In Harrison Bergeron, the society is physically restricted with weights, masks, and earphones.

This is a short, but powerful excerpt from the short story “Harrison Bergeron”. Not only does it make you wonder why everyone is equal, but makes you wonder how in the world did everyone become equal? The short film, 2081 is based off of its short story “Harrison Bergeron”, yet their stories are quite different from each other. In the short story and the short film, Kurt Vonnegut presents a scary view of human society in the United States in the future, in which the citizens are all uniform. This then leads to their loss of individuality, and therefore to the absolute deformity of humanness.

Yes his argument was compelling because he used persuasive words that made the King of Britain sound like a monster and a horrible dictator and that they needed independence badly before things got even worse. In Common Sense Paine says this “For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have the right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever and tho’ himself might deserve some decent degree of honours of his contemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them.” Paine was saying that even though the people were born free they would never know how free they really were because they were under harsh dictatorship and basically that is all the people knew back then. Thomas Paine was trying to get to the point that America will eventually become dependent. At times, he introduces this as a simple fact that everyone accepts, but sometimes, he argues for it, quoting the area of the flaw separating the colonies and the English king.

The way to achieve this, is with the previously stated laws and bans that only deprived people from their liberties. Even the simplest things, like make-up, were prohibited, leading to an extremist government, where men were clearly superior. However, this class difference existed even between women, like the merciless Aunts and the useless unwomen. The Handmaid’s where only tools for having babies and future soldiers for the war as is expressed in the quote ““cradle[s] of life, made of bones; and within, hazards, warped proteins, bad crystals jagged as glass” and “shock troops … [who will] march out in advance, into dangerous territory” – a kind of baby-machine who will produce soldiers to fight for the country.” (Atwood, 194). In the end all the methods used to protect women only reinforced the discrimination, and Handmaids are depicted as baby machines.

A Literary Analysis of the Novel 1984 by George Orwell Nineteen Eighty Four is a dystopian novel written by Gorge Orwell in 1948 and was later published in 1949. The novel depicts a totalitarian dystopian world where all the citizens are constantly brainwashed and are forced to be equal. The people in the book are forced to work for big brother without any freedom as their rights are infringed. The party in the novel suppresses the people’s thinking by making them equal in addition to creating fear in them through strict laws and propaganda in order to stop them from resisting. Through this book, Orwell warns us of our possible future in 1984 by using symbolism, protagonists, and antagonists throughout 1984.

Is a perfect society possible, or is it just the seed of a corrupt governments rise to total control, masquerading the truth from its community. In The Giver, by Lois Lowry, the protagonist named Jonas just happens to be one of the government’s pawns at the time. Throughout the book, Jonas learns that the ‘perfect’ society he’s been living in his life isn’t a utopia after all. It actually turns out to be a dystopian society, where there is no freedom to do the things that people take for granted in modern society. The dystopian society written about in The Giver has many distinct differences and some similarities whilst being held up to the light with modern society today.