Harrison Bergeron

Black humor uses comedy to discuss serious or taboo subjects. The narrator notes that “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” (18). The juxtaposition of the weather to Harrison’s abduction suggests that the incident is not taken seriously enough.

Vonnegut uses the device throughout the story. After George forms a thought and soon hears a “twenty-one-gun salute in his head,” Hazel comments, “that was a doozy” (21) Calling his torture “a doozy” makes it seem that this horrible incident is commonplace; it also understates the severity of the issue, as the “salute” is potent enough that it leaves George trembling with tears in his eyes.

A dystopia is a vision of a society in cataclysmic decline; it is the inversion of a utopia. “Harrison Bergeron” presents a future in which the government takes away 14-year-old children from their parents, imposes handicaps on citizens, and threatens fines or jail for anybody who disobeys. Vonnegut’s thought experiment shows that, if the government is to enforce equality, the word “equality” must be properly understood, otherwise it can justify oppression.