“Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
In “Harrison Bergeron”, the author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. combined science-fiction and satire to tell the story of a future where people are equal at the expense of having to wear handicaps that are enforced by the government. Told from the perspective of the Bergeron family, the reader learns about the methods that the government, or the H-G men, use to maintain equality among the people and what they have to give up as individuals in the process.
The government present in the future of “Harrison Bergeron” enforces a variety of handicaps to ensure that the people are not different from each other and remain equal. For example, the government enforces a law that requires people with above-average intelligence like George to wear a mental handicap. This handicap is said to be a radio that receives government transmissions and aims to prevent people from “taking unfair advantage of their brains” (Vonnegut Jr. 232). This handicap is implied to be painful and is experienced by George several times throughout the story to prevent him from remembering his own son, Harrison Bergeron. Harrison’s mother Hazel doesn’t wear a handicap but can’t remember him either because she “[has] a perfectly average intelligence, which meant [that] she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts” (Vonnegut Jr. 232).
