Comparing Player Piano, Harrison Bergeron, And 2BR02B

Kurt Vonnegut is an author who is well-known for his sarcastic tone of how people live and futuristic time periods. Vonnegut thinks many people accept things as they are in this world, without looking for the truth. He wants readers to question the world we live in. He does this by persuading the reader into seeing the crucial day issues that were present around the time he was writing. His sarcastic tone and futuristic settings are meant to draw in the reader to make bold statements from his perspective. A few of his short stories are “Player Piano,” “Harrison Bergeron,” and “2BR02B." In Kurt Vonnegut’s “2BR02B” advancement of technology is used to show the world that even the grandest utopia can not resolve all our problems, to instill

In Vonnegut’s visioned future, machines are enslaving mankind. Paul, the main character, does not make his own choices. He is determined by the machines that rule the society. “Those who live by electronics, die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis” (Player Piano 15). Vonnegut is saying that the characters become the machines themselves, and can not think on their own. He thinks technological improvement is killing human kind. As well, he thinks technological process without social process is not process from the start. He wants people to realize this. In an interview Vonnegut had asked “What if all economically useful works could be done more cheaply and satisfactory by machines than by human beings?”(Reeds and Leeds 36). He believes that the mechanization of the current world is ruining human nobility. According to “The Short Fiction of Kurt Vonnegut” by Peter J. Reed, Vonnegut had used this ironic technique of writing to show his view of the world. "Utopias in science fiction novel are always wreathed in ironies" (Klinkowitz

The narrator is in love with a woman named Pat. Eventually EPICAC falls in love with Pat. Upon realizing that Pat can not be in love with a computer, EPICAC ends up destroying itself since it can not be with the woman it loves. From the help of a computer, Pat and the narrator end up getting married. Vonnegut is showing us how the advancement of technology is negatively influencing us through our increasing dependence on it. It shows that humans are growing too attached to machines. He wants us to understand that our growth of dependent on materialistic items will get out of hand if we continue to let technology do easy tasks for us that we are capable of doing ourselves.

Jerome Klinkowitz while studying Vonnegut's literature noted Vonnegut shares with the readers that we are headed for a disaster unless we find something to live by outside of technology. Therefore, by doing so, we offer a way to stay alive.

Vonnegut is not fully against technology, he is against the way it is being used. His sarcastic writing about society opens the reader’s mind into what they should be thinking about. In “2BR02B”, he shows that even the grandest utopia can not resolve all our problems, to instill fright of what the world is becoming in the reader, and to demonstrate the negative influence our technological advancements have on ourselves. A lot of his other works