Fear Revealed In Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron

The government finally made everyone equal to each other. Although, now you are in handicaps that control almost everything you do. Then they take your son. You can’t stop them from taking him. You fear for what they will do to him. And now, you can’t think about it for long because you have loud noises going off from your handicap earpiece. This is what happens to the Bergeron family in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s short story,“Harrison Bergeron,” this short story takes place in the year 2081. Everyone was finally equal after the new Amendments to the Constitution, and to the agents of the United States Handicapper General. Harrison, the son of George and Hazel Bergeron was taken away by the government at age of fourteen. Harrison had been smarter

On page 1, the author shows that the government were fearful of anyone above average so they had chosen to put those people in handicaps to control their lives with fear and to make them like the average person. Vonnegut writes, “They weren’t really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. There 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.” This demonstrates how fear can control how you act because the government had feared the people who had been above them. They felt provoked by the people who had been above average so they decided to control them by putting handicaps on those people. However, they had believed that Harrison the son of George and Hazel Bergeron was going to overthrow the government so they had put him in the biggest and heaviest handicaps to keep him from overthrowing them. They had started to greatly fear him and what he was going to

First, they put every above average person in handicaps. Then, they take 14 year old Harrison. FInally, they kill Harrison in front of hundreds of people. The text even describes how Diana, the handicap general was using trying to control everyone when Vonnegut writes, “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.” She fears that everyone that is smart will try and overthrow the government so she forces those people to wear the handicaps. She is doing everything to try and dumb them down and to make them incapable of rebelling. Certainly it could be said that Diana Moon Glampers and the government were trying to protect everyone. While this is a good point, because she is trying to make everyone equal so they are not alway competing against each other. Yet, it fails to include the fact the she had killed Harrison. In her jealousy and her fear-has made everyone fear her and be controlled by that