Although equality is an attribute that many countries have been trying to achieve for years now, Kurt Vonnegut uses equality against the characters in Harrison Bergeron. He makes it so that every character is equal in any possible way, from how smart they are to what they look like. Because of this, everyone and everything in their society is average. The author uses a society in need of help to assist him when explaining that equality in every possible way is not always the best thing. The theme in the short story, Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut is that people do not need to be equal in every possible way but the different strengths and weaknesses in each person makes them equal. When Kurt Vonnegut wrote this story his purpose was to explain to the reader what society …show more content…
In Harrison Bergeron, Vonnegut creates a buzzer that goes in the character’s ears if the person had an above average intelligence. This way their “thoughts fled in panic” approximately every twenty seconds if they were thinking about something that was too difficult for an average person to think about. If the wittier people were being distracted from their thoughts a few times per minute and the average people would just forget what they were thinking, everyone appeared to be equal. This means that nobody would actually be smart, therefore society would stay the same. With nobody coming up with new ideas, then both the economy and the society would be at a stand still. Another way that Vonnegut showed what society was like was by showing the readers what happened if someone had not had their personal strengths dulled. Vonnegut emphasized the importance of equality in this society by saying that “She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.” This scene was when a person was publically rebelling against the use of handicaps. This shows that people were forced to be equal in every possible way. They were not allowed to have unique