What Was Kurt Vonnegut Thinking?

The many interpretations of everyone's high school short story assigned reading

In a creative writing class I was assigned to read, like so many students before, Kurt Vonnegut’s short story Harrison Bergeron. 

So the students went dutifully off to the library, a second-hand book store, or a sketchy online pdf download and read the story.

Most of us didn’t think about it much after that. It’s a simple enough story. Goes like this:

A husband and wife have had their son taken from them, but they don’t remember because they’re too dull. You see, they live in a society in which “everyone was finally equal.”

Everyone wore weights around their necks and chips in their heads that blasted the sounds of car wrecks and breaking glass anytime they thought a little too deeply. No person was allowed, by threat of arrest, to be any better than anyone else.

The parents watch the TV – passively, distractedly – as their kidnapped son, Harrison, bursts onto the set, commands the screen, frees himself from his bondage, and declares himself emperor. He dances with a beautiful woman, leaping high enough to kiss the ceiling, before a government agent barges in and shoots them down with two successive shotgun blasts.

The wife, sitting on the couch witnessing her son’s murder on television, cries, but can’t quite remember why.

The husband helpfully suggests she “forget sad things.”

And the wife proudly responds, “I always do.”

That’s it. We students flipped the book closed and went on with our days. There were classes to get to and assignments to turn in.

When it came time to discuss the story, we had the expected conversations about what it “means.”

A cautionary tale about the dangers of government-enforced equality. A dystopian future where all things extraordinary are reviled and commonness is the only valued currency. It is the death of art, beauty, and awe.

We talked about the pacification of people who believe they deserve the same as everyone else. The world that made sure no one “seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in.”

It is the inverse of The Incredibles villain Syndrome’s decree that “when everyone’s super, no one will be” because in Harrison Bergeron’s world, they do not raise everyone to the level of the best, but reduce everyone to the level of the dullest.

Then someone in our class – someone who evidently thought about this story for more than a handful of seconds – asked a simple question.

“Do you guys know when this was published?”

I don’t know if any student knew exactly. A quick google search revealed: 1961.

The thoughtful student looked around the room.

“Seems a little weird to write a story about the dangers of equality in the middle of the civil rights movement, right?”

Now we were getting somewhere.

For the rest of the class we discussed and researched and thought about this story beyond the obvious, maybe incorrect interpretation.

What was a socially conscious Kurt Vonnegut thinking? Was he critiquing the civil rights movement and the forced equality it implied?

 [See: The Little Rock Nine just a few years before in 1957. U.S. Soldiers guiding a group of black students into a school whose population was making it violently clear that the black students were not wanted. That was forced equality if there ever was such a thing. Was Vonnegut really critiquing this?]

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What about the Cold War? Another student suggested. Was this story actually doing the opposite of what many people assumed? Was this a story satirizing the blind fear of Communism and Socialism that had gripped the nation for so long?

Read in this way, the absurdity of the story is meant to mock the mindset of Cold War Americans. They feared Communism and Socialism so much that art and science and ideas from Communist sources were blacklisted. To be accused of Communist sympathies could spell the end of career and even of freedom.

Now that we bring it up, the story is pretty absurd. The rebellious Harrison, “tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.” He leapt thirty feet in the air. He hovered there, kissing his equally supernatural lover. He ripped a door off its hinges.

If this is meant to be a truly ominous warning of our future if we succumb to the dangers of equality, then why make it so comical?

Speaking of Harrison. What was that he shouted at the TV?

"I am the Emperor! Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!"

If we are reading this story as it is traditionally read (a warning of the dangers of equality), then this man is supposed to be the resisting hero. He is fighting back, he is unabashedly extraordinary, he is beautiful and strong and refuses to be held down.

And he wants to be a tyrant.

Not quite the moral hero we might want.

A final note. In a 2005 debate over school finance, Harrison Bergeron was brought up.

One group wanted locally raised taxes to be used in their local schools. Others said that wasn’t fair, the wealthy areas would get the best funding, and the poorer areas would be left with less.

Those in favor of localized funding brought up Harrison Bergeron. Why should we be forced to be equal with the neighboring counties? Why should we not be allowed to be extraordinary in our schools, if we have the funds to do it?

Well, Vonnegut weighed in.

He said his story was “about intelligence and talent, and wealth is not a demonstration of either one.”

He argued that students in poorer areas – who are every bit as talented – shouldn’t be left with the disadvantage of under-funded schools just because they didn’t have enough money.

Regardless of how you read this story, it taught me – and everyone in that creative writing class – the importance (and joy) in close reading.

What a story reveals at first glance is rarely all there is to find. Good writing is like Hemingway describes it – an iceberg that reveals little, but offers incalculably more to those willing to look under the surface.