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aCTIvITy 2.3
continued
Short Story
Harrison Bergeron
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
1 THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
2 Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. 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.
3 It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.
4 George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel’s cheeks, but she’d forgotten for the moment what they were about, as the ballerinas came to the end of a dance.
5 A buzzer sounded in George’s head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.
6 “That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did,” said Hazel.
7 “Huh,” said George.
8 “That dance—it was nice,” said Hazel.
9 “Yup,” said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren’t
really very good—no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sash weights 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. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.
10 George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.
11 Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George
what the latest sound had been.
12 “Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer,” said George.
13 “I’d think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds,” said Hazel a little envious. “All the things they think up.”
Word CoNNeCTIoNS
Etymology
The verb to handicap is a
word taken from sports. In the late 19th century, handicap meant the extra weight given
to a superior race horse to
even the odds of winning for other horses. The sports term became generalized over time and came to mean the practice of assigning disadvantage to certain players to equalize the chances of winning. Vonnegut’s “Handicapper General” is in charge of dumbing down and disabling citizens who are above average so that all citizens are equal.
my Notes
Unit 2
• The Challenge of Utopia 111
unceasing: relentless; persistent; continuous
vigilance: watchfulness; alertness
ball-peen hammer: a hammer used in metalworking, distinguished by a hemispherical head
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