Pre-Reading Vocabulary
Unceasing
– never ending
Vigilance
– being aware of what is happening
Handicapper General – an imaginary
position made up for this story;
the
politician who makes sure smart or beautiful people are disfigured (with masks,
weights, and other hindrances) or made unintelligent (with buzzers in the ear
so they cannot concentrate) so everyone is the same
Sashweights – weights hung around
the waist
Birdshot – small, heavy pellets
designed for shooting birds
Ball Peen Hammer – a hammer used for
beating metal
Doozy – something
extraordinary – can be good or bad
Luminous – glowing, warm
Grackle squawk – croaking like a crow
Hindrances – something that
restrains or prevents someone from
doing something
Harrison Bergeron
by
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal.
They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which
way. 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,
and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper
General.
Some things about living still weren't quite right,
though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime.
And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel
Bergeron's fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.
It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel
couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence,
which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And
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. It
was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the
transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from
taking unfair advantage of their brains.
George
and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel's cheeks, but
she'd forgotten for the moment what they were about.
On the television screen were ballerinas.
A buzzer sounded in George's head. His thoughts
fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.
"That was a real pretty dance, that dance they
just did," said Hazel.
"Huh" said George.
"That dance-it was nice," said Hazel.
"Yup," said George. He tried to think a
little about the ballerinas. They weren't really very good-no better than anybody
else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of
birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and
graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in.
George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn't be
handicapped. But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear
radio scattered his thoughts.
George winced. So did two out of the eight
ballerinas.
Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap
herself, she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.
"Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle
with a ball peen hammer," said George.
"I'd think it would be real interesting,
hearing all the different sounds," said Hazel a little envious. "All
the things they think up."
"Um," said George.
"Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know
what I would do?" said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong
resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers.
"If I was Diana Moon Glampers," said Hazel, "I'd have chimes on
Sunday-just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion."
"I could think, if it was just chimes,"
said George.
"Well-maybe make 'em real loud," said
Hazel. "I think I'd make a good Handicapper General."
"Good as anybody else," said George.
"Who knows better then I do what normal
is?" said Hazel.
"Right," said George. He began to think
glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a
twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.
"Boy!" said Hazel, "that was a
doozy, wasn't it?"
It was such a doozy that George was white and
trembling, and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of of the eight
ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples.
"All of a sudden you look so tired," said
Hazel. "Why don't you stretch out on the sofa, so's you can rest your
handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch." She was referring to the
forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around
George's neck. "Go on and rest the bag for a little while," she said.
"I don't care if you're not equal to me for a while."
George weighed the bag with his hands. "I
don't mind it," he said. "I don't notice it any more. It's just a
part of me."
"You been so tired lately-kind of wore
out," said Hazel. "If there was just some way we could make a little
hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just
a few."
"Two years in prison and two thousand dollars
fine for every ball I took out," said George. "I don't call that a
bargain."
"If you could just take a few out when you
came home from work," said Hazel. "I mean-you don't compete with
anybody around here. You just set around."
"If I tried to get away with it," said
George, "then other people'd get away with it-and pretty soon we'd be
right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody
else. You wouldn't like that, would you?"
"I'd hate it," said Hazel.
"There you are," said George. The minute
people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?"
If Hazel hadn't been able to come up with an answer
to this question, George couldn't have supplied one. A siren was going off in
his head.
"Reckon it'd fall all apart," said Hazel.
"What would?" said George blankly.
"Society," said Hazel uncertainly.
"Wasn't that what you just said?
"Who knows?" said George.
The television program was suddenly interrupted for
a news bulletin. It wasn't clear at first as to what the bulletin was about,
since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For
about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to
say, "Ladies and Gentlemen."
He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a
ballerina to read.
"That's all right-" Hazel said of the
announcer, "he tried. That's the big thing. He tried to do the best he
could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so
hard."
"Ladies and Gentlemen," said the
ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful,
because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the
strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as
big as those worn by two-hundred pound men.
And she had to apologize at once for her voice,
which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm,
luminous, timeless melody. "Excuse me-" she said, and she began
again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.
"Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen," she
said in a grackle squawk, "has just escaped from jail, where he was held
on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an
athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely
dangerous."
A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was
flashed on the screen-upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right
side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background
calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.
The rest of Harrison's appearance was Halloween and
hardware. Nobody had ever born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances
faster than the H-G men could think them up.
Instead of a little ear
radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and
spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not
only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.
Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily,
there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to
strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of
life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.
And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required
that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows
shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth
random.
"If you see this boy," said the
ballerina, "do not - I repeat, do not - try to reason with him."
There was the shriek of a door being torn from its
hinges.
Screams and barking cries of consternation came
from the television set. The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen
jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake.
George Bergeron correctly identified the
earthquake, and well he might have - for many was the time his own home had
danced to the same crashing tune. "My God-" said George, "that
must be Harrison!"
The
realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile
collision in his head.
When George could open his eyes again, the photograph
of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.
Clanking,
clownish, and huge, Harrison stood - in the center of the studio. The knob of
the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians,
musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.
"I am the Emperor!" cried Harrison.
"Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at
once!" He stamped his foot and the studio shook.
"Even as I stand here" he bellowed,
"crippled, hobbled, sickened - I am a greater ruler than any man who ever
lived! Now watch me become what I can become!"
Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness
like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.
Harrison's
scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor.
Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the
padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison
smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.
He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man
that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.
"I shall now select my Empress!" he said,
looking down on the cowering people. "Let the first woman who dares rise
to her feet claim her mate and her throne!"
A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose,
swaying like a willow.
Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear,
snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all he
removed her mask.
She was blindingly beautiful.
"Now-" said Harrison, taking her hand,
"shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!" he
commanded.
The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and
Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. "Play your best," he
told them, "and I'll make you barons and dukes and earls."
The music began. It was normal at first-cheap,
silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them
like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back
into their chairs.
The music began again and was much improved.
Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the
music for a while-listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats
with it.
They shifted their weights to their toes.
Harrison placed his big hands on the girls tiny
waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers.
And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into
the air they sprang!
Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but
the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.
They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered,
gamboled, and spun.
They leaped like deer on the moon.
The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each
leap brought the dancers nearer to it.
It became their obvious intention to kiss the
ceiling. They kissed it.
And then, neutraling gravity with love and pure
will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed
each other for a long, long time.
It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the
Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge
shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they
hit the floor.
Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed
it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps
back on.
It was then that the Bergerons' television tube
burned out.
Hazel
turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone out into
the kitchen for a can of beer.
George came back in with the beer, paused while a
handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. "You been crying"
he said to Hazel.
"Yup," she said.
"What about?" he said.
"I forget," she said. "Something
real sad on television."
"What was it?" he said.
"It's all kind of mixed up in my mind,"
said Hazel.
"Forget sad things," said George.
"I always do," said Hazel.
"That's my girl," said George. He winced.
There was the sound of a rivetting gun in his head.
"Gee - I could tell that one was a
doozy," said Hazel.
"You can say that again," said George.
"Gee-" said Hazel, "I could tell
that one was a doozy."
Questions
for
Harrison Bergeron
1.
Why do you think that Harrison is such a threat to society?
2.
Why don’t any of the characters besides Harrison and the ballerina want to
change anything? Why don’t they fight against what is happening?
3. If you lived in this society, what would the
Handicapper General need to add/remove from you to make you equal to everyone
else? Explain.
