Use Of Imagery In Harrison Bergeron

In his short story Harrison Bergeron, Kurt Vonnegut uses an astounding amount of powerful imagery and diction to create the perfect scenes of the dystopian reality he creates. Throughout his use of imagery, Vonnegut creates scenes palpably imagined by readers. He uses underlying humor to lighten scenes of the morbid and macabre nature of the future where being different can be a death sentence. The future that is created in totality by Vonnegut is a dire scene created to be filled with a pastiche of people strung with handicaps to make them to be exactly the same as the “perfectly average citizen.” Vonnegut’s tone throughout is both dreary towards the bizarre and twisted dystopia that makes everyone equal, but is also somewhat insulting to those who do not bear handicaps due to being lacking both mentally and physically.

If someone is deemed above average, they are brought to a similar fate as George Bergeron; “George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times.” (Vonnegut 1). They are brought unwillingly down to a similar level of potential in life as everyone else. People are not meant to succeed beyond others, they are simply forced to be able to perform a job in a somewhat robotic fashion of exactly the same as everyone else. Nobody is special, nobody is better than anyone, and everybody is completely equal. That is what Vonnegut portrays in his dystopian “perfect reality,” everybody deserves to be no better than anybody else. He uses highly descriptive diction and imagery to create a perfect depiction of this