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Harrison Bergeron - College Essay

Harrison Bergeron

The story “Harrison Bergeron” is about a world where everyone is required to be equal. Anyone who is above average in anything is required to have a handicap to make him or her the same as everyone else. The handicaps are used to make smart people unable to think and the beautiful people ugly. Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” uses the theme of equality to show that it results in the demise of creative thinking and individuality destroying individualism and a free society. This will be shown through the use of physical and mental handicaps.
One of the main characters was above average in intelligence and was therefore required to wear a handicap. His handicap was a pair of headphones ...

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to make any person who was better looking look absolutely hideous. The more beautiful the person was the scarier the mask would be to hide it. The masks ensured that no individualism was being shown and that no one looked at all better than someone else. The fact that the government was trying to force equality upon him upset Harrison Bergeron very much. He felt that they needed new power and that individuality and creativity was the key to a free society. He rebelled against the equality and danced with no handicaps on because he was an individual with his own thoughts and his own looks. He had plans to overrun the idea of total equality. His individualism lead to him being shot by the woman who controlled the use of handicaps. The fact that his father had a mental handicap to skew his thoughts made him not realize that the whole scene of his son being shot had just been on TV. His wife did not tell him because in a world of total equality she wanted to do anything she could to keep ...

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Harrison Bergeron. (2011, May 5). Retrieved August 22, 2025, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Harrison-Bergeron/98890

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 5/5/2011 12:28:47 AM
Submitted By: SilverBell
Category: English
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 486
Pages: 2

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