Analysis of Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron"

sHiZo963

Jedi
First off, read the entire short story here (highly recommended):

Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron"
http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/hb.html

Here's an essay I wrote about it a while back that I dug up, for what it's worth.

Through Understatement Comes Clarity
The year was 2181, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal in every which way.
Kurt Vonnegut’s short story "Harrison Bergeron" is a satirical science fiction tale about the dark side of an ideal, utopian American society. Nothing is overtly suggestive of negativity, however, as the story is told through the third-person point of view of an objective narrator. Yet the implications and subtleties of the narrator’s descriptions are nothing short of tragic, often even comically so. Vonnegut’s use of dark satire evokes a strong response as it makes one quickly realize that this utopian society is more resembling of a dystopia. A dystopia is defined as a seemingly utopian society with at least one fatal flaw; in Vonnegut’s "Harrison Bergeron", the setting is "a ruthlessly egalitarian society, in which ability and accomplishment, or even competence, are suppressed or stigmatized as forms of inequality" ("Dystopia," online). Vonnegut’s choice of "equalities" is essential to the story’s meaning: by focusing on the subjective types of equality and understating the objective ones, he satirizes not the ideal of equality itself but rather the American society’s flawed idea of equality.

Karen and Charles Wood have said of Vonnegut’s many short stories: “Vonnegut proves repeatedly … that men and women remain fundamentally the same, no matter what technology surrounds them." While "Harrison Bergeron" is at least partly about the (mis)use of technology, Vonnegut doesn’t seem to give much focus to gender issues or the differences between men and women. Not giving attention to one of the most controversial equality issues of our time in a literary work that is specifically about the notion of equality is questionable; the women’s rights movement was very active in the early 1960’s when Vonnegut wrote his short story. Does the introduction say it all – was everyone really "equal in every which way"� It is no secret that biologically, as well as socially, women are different from men, both in physical attributes and in behavior. In the present male-dominated society, the traits of men are held superior to those of women – aggressiveness and emotional detachment is favored in the competitive capitalistic economy. This brings to mind economics and income, another traditional type of equality. The polar opposite to capitalism, communism, was also a big issue during the time in which Vonnegut was writing his short story – the Cold War was in full swing in the early 1960’s, with the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban Missile Crisis – but, once again, Vonnegut seems to avoid this issue explicitly in this short story. At first glance, one might think it is a communistic society that Vonnegut is writing about, but this is certainly not the case; as Darryl Hattenhauer explains in “The Politics of Kurt Vonnegut's ‘Harrison Bergeron’":
The story does not address the primary purpose of leveling in other countries: income redistribution. Since Hazel, Harrison's mother, wants the television announcer to get a raise, the definition of "equal every which way" cannot include incomes. (Hattenhauer, online)
What, then, is so equal about the society presented, in which "everybody was finally equal"? As many of equality’s main issues, such as gender, race, and income, have been seemingly left out from the story, it can be assumed that the setting of “Harrison Bergeron" is fundamentally the same as the American society of the early 1960’s, which was not too different from present American society.

It is interesting and worthwhile to note what Vonnegut does focus on in terms of equality in “Harrison Bergeron." Right in the introduction, the three main issues that are concerned throughout the story are given:
Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution.
Thus, absolute equality in intelligence, physical beauty, and athleticism have been ratified into law by the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, respectively. Are these really the most crucial points of inequality concerning society? If anything, they seem to be the traits that the American mass-media put most significance on in popular TV shows, movies, and magazines. Sports, movie, and rock/pop stars are the ultimate role models of our time for mainstream Americans; they are sources of envy because of their good looks and physical talents which bring them fame and fortune. In terms of intelligence, many Americans would consider these people "smart" in that they were able to get “to the top." Hattenhauer comments on this quite heavily in his essay:
According to the proponents of the ideology of America's dominant culture, equal income redistribution would contradict the fact that some are smarter than others (the corollary: the rich are smart and the poor are dumb), and also contradict the fact that some are better looking or more athletic than others (the corollary: attractive and athletic people deserve wealth). Since the power of class and the benefits of income redistribution are obscured in the dominant culture's ideology, the inequalities caused by class differences are appropriately absent from this story. For example, there is nothing about equal access to education or medical care. (Hattenhauer, online)
What Vonnegut seems to be satirizing most, then, are the obvious contradictions in Americans’ notions of equality. The egalitarian dystopia he creates in “Harrison Bergeron" is tragically flawed because of its defective foundation – the American ideology of equality, an ideology that ignores the objective reality and its practical problems to which practical solutions can be found and glorifies in its place the subjective ideals that are personified in popular mainstream role models. Of course, the only practical way to achieve equality in this respect is to reduce everyone to a least common denominator in terms of intelligence, beauty, and athleticism – everybody and nobody is a sports, movie, and rock/pop star, so there is no one to envy and nobody to look up to, and all of this while the realities of income, race, and gender inequalities may still abound in society but are popularly ignored. This is what appears to be happening in the society presented in "Harrison Bergeron."

It can be concluded that the understatement of the objective is actually Vonnegut’s way of revealing to the reader what really is important in terms of equality. Clearly, the American popular notion of equality is flawed, and Vonnegut attempts to show this by the utter nonsense of its realized "perfection" in the society of "Harrison Bergeron." When looked at in this view of "clarity through understatement," the Woods’ assertion that Vonnegut’s work proves the fundamental equality of men and women doesn’t fit. Since gender issues are not explicitly stated in the story, it can be assumed that they are very much a concern in the real world, just like income and race inequality. Like intelligence, athleticism, and beauty, gender traits are something people have initially no control over when born, but nonetheless they are given specific values by the culture in which they are found. Americans seem to be fooling themselves by ignoring the social problems caused by inequality in objective terms and by focusing instead on the subjective, popularly invented, and fundamentally unimportant issues.

Vonnegut’s satirical tale is anything but the same-old criticism of the extreme use of governmental power that many literary critics initially dismissed it to be. On the contrary, it is an implicit criticism of the mass culture and, more specifically, of its utter ignorance to real, objective social problems. The Saturday Evening Post wrote in 1974:
Much of the wrangle that tears us apart derives from ideas that individual analysis would quickly ascertain to be absurd but which, collectively, we accept, support, promote. No subject illustrates this contradiction better than the notion of equality. Even though nature patently makes each of us different, man, by due diligence, may be able to make us identical. Kurt Vonnegut shows us how in his story "Harrison Bergeron." ("Even Fingerprints Differ," 46)
What seems to be missing is this notion of "individual analysis;" individuals are so concerned over what society deems popular that they fail to look at themselves and, as a result, at their society in an objective, critical way. In the hustle of every-day life and the multitude of stresses that come from this unnatural need to conform to popular standards, it is easy to lose one’s individuality and take on a popularly subjective point of view. The ideal of equality gets corrupted in this collective antithesis, as Vonnegut so clearly shows; it veers from its objective equal treatment of man to mean the same as conformity in areas that naturally cannot be "conformed." Intelligence, physical beauty, and athleticism are traits that are socially popularized but in reality are non-issues when compared to the objective problems caused by income, race, and gender inequalities. As a result, "Harrison Bergeron" can be read as an introspective, self-critical work - as a satire of not only the all-too-common blunders of the Powers That Be, but of the faulty subjective reasoning of mass culture and its destructive influence on the individual.

Works Cited
"Dystopia." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Updated October 2006. Visited 15 October 2006. < http://en(dot)wikipedia(dot)org/wiki/Dystopia >.
"Even Fingerprints Differ." Saturday Evening Post. Volume 246, Issue 3. April 1974: 46.
Hattenhauer, Darryl. "The Politics of Kurt Vonnegut's ‘Harrison Bergeron.'" Studies in Short Fiction 35. Number 4. Fall 1998: 387-92.
 
There is a third article also.

http://www.signs-of-the-times.org/articles/show/130159-They+want+to+put+us+back+on+the+snake-oil+standard+again
 
I caught something on crooksandliars.com in which John Stuart interviewed Kurt Vonnegut. I believe it was 2002.. (guess I could have checked the link more thoroughly..) :( . He seemed very witty and had a kind of charm and demeanor. The footage is somewhat blurry.

ok after a nights slumber I realized I never left a link, DOH!

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/04/12/kurt-vonnegut-on-the-daily-show/
 
Movie "2081". Seems to adhere pretty closely to the short story, available on YouTube, who knows for how long...
 
By coincidence, I stumbled upon a video where Kurt Vonnegut talks about 'The Shape of Stories', analyzing in a humorous way e.g. Shakespear's Hamlet. His presentation was funny and witty, but at the same time there was a certain sadness and lament of the state of humanity. Fascinating and wonderful!

 
By coincidence, I stumbled upon a video where Kurt Vonnegut talks about 'The Shape of Stories', analyzing in a humorous way e.g. Shakespear's Hamlet. His presentation was funny and witty, but at the same time there was a certain sadness and lament of the state of humanity. Fascinating and wonderful!

It is wonderful to see how some people "exude" wisdom from their pores.

What an interesting person, it is a pleasure to listen to him.
 
Yeah! Thanks for sharing Aragorn. I'd never seen footage of him or heard him talk before.. Loved the bit about "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."...He was just how I imagined he'd be :) I read most of his books as a kid and liked them very much, though doubt I understood them! Must read 'em again..
 
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