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interpret the Text Using Close Reading
aCTiViTY 1.3
continued
26 “Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out,” said George. “I don’t call that a bargain.”
27 “If you could just take a few out when you came home from work,” said Hazel. “I mean—you don’t compete with anybody around here. You just sit around.”
28 “If I tried to get away with it,” said George, “then other people’d get away with it— and pretty soon we’d be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”
29 “I’d hate it,” said Hazel.
30 “There you are,” said George. The minute people start cheating on laws, what do
you think happens to society?”
31 If Hazel hadn’t been able to come up with an answer to this question, George
couldn’t have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.
32 “Reckon it’d fall all apart,” said Hazel.
33 “What would?” said George blankly.
34 “Society,” said Hazel uncertainly. “Wasn’t that what you just said?
35 “Who knows?” said George.
36 The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn’t clear
at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, “Ladies and Gentlemen.”
37 He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.
38 “That’s all right—” Hazel said of the announcer, “he tried. That’s the big thing. He
tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard.”
39 “Ladies and Gentlemen,” said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred pound men.
40 And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for
a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. “Excuse me—” she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.
41 “Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen,” she said in a grackle squawk, “has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous.”
42 A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen—upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.
43 The rest of Harrison’s appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever borne heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.
My notes
Unit 2 • The Challenge of Utopia • Part 1: Harrison Bergeron 53
impediment: a physical defect that prevents normal speech
grackle: any of several blackbirds smaller than a crow
hindrances: obstacles; deterrents
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