Kurt Vou..egut
214
.Ir. 215
Chapter 6 . Tile.....
Till it came to me one day there were women doing this with their lives, all
over. There were women just waiting and waiting by mailboxes for one letter or another. I imagined me making this journey day after day and year after year, and my
hair starting to get gray, and I thought, I was never made to go on like that. So I
stopped meeting the mail. If there were women all through life waiting, and
women busy and not waiting, I knew which I had to be. Even though there might
be things the second kind of women have to pass up and never know about, it still
is better.
I was surprised when the mailman phoned the Peebleses' place in the evening
and asked for me. He said he missed me. He asked if I would like to go to Goderich,
where some well-known movie was on, I forget now what. So I said yes, and I went
out with him for two years and he asked me to marry him, and we were engaged a
year more while I got my things together, and then we did marry. He always tells the
children the story of how I went after him by sitting by the mailbox every day, and
naturally I laugh and let him, because I like for people to think'what pleases them
and makes them happy.
Questions
1. What is your attitude toward Edie, the narrator-sympathy, condescension, disapproval,
or something more complicated? Explain.
2. What aspects of Mrs. Peebles and her life does Edie admire or envy? What things about
Mrs. Peebles does she find off-putting?
3. Why does Edie dislike Loretta Bird so much?
4. Reread the description of Alice Kelling in paragraph 94. What details does Edie notice
about her, and why are these qualities important to Edie?
5. It is interesting that the story contains no description of Chris Watters's personal appearance. Why not, do you think? What are the things about him that really matter to Edie?
6. The twist at the end of the story may remind you of "The Gift of the Magi." Is there here,
as there is in O. Henry's tale, more to the conclusion than just a clever surprise?
7. How would you state the theme of this story?Explain.
thy son. But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on
him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet: And bring hither the fatted
calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry: For this my son was dead, and is alive
again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry. Now his elder son was
in the field: and he came and drew nigh to the house, he heard music and dancing.
And he called one of the servants, and asked what these things meant. And he said
unto him, Thy brother is come; and thy father hath killed the fatted calf, because he
hath received him safe and sound. And he was angry, and would not go in: therefore
came his father out, and entreated him. And he answering said to his father, Lo,
these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment; and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends:
But as soon as this thy son was come, which hath devoured thy living with harlots,
thou hast killed for him the fatted calf. And he said unto him, Son thou art ever with
me, and all that I have is thine. It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad:
for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.
Questions
1. This story has traditionally been called "The Parable of the Prodigal Son." What does
prodigalmean?Which ofthe twobrothersis prodigal?
2. What position does the younger son expect when he returns to his father's house? What
does the father give him?
3. When the older brother seesthe celebration for his younger brother's return, he growsangry. He makes a very reasonable set of complaints to his father. He has indeed been a
loyal and moral son, but what virtue does the older brother lack?
4. Is the father fair to the elder son? Explain your answer.
5. Theologians have discussed this parable's religious significance for two thousand years.
What, in your own words, is the human theme of the story?
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Harrison Bergeron
Luke
The
15:11-32
Parable
of the Prodigal
Son
(Authorized or Kiug .lames Version, 1611)
And he said, A certain man had two sons: And the younger of them said to his
father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto
them his living. And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and
took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living. And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want. And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he
sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would fain have filled his belly with the
husks that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him. And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to spare,
and I perish with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him,
Father I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to.be
called thy son; make me as one of thy hired servants. And he arose, and came to his
father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion,
and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. And the son said unto him, Father I
have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called
1961
Kurt Vonnegut]r. (1922-2007) was born in Indianapolis. During the Depression his father,
a well-to-do architect, had virtually no work, and the family lived in reduced circumstances.
Vonnegut attended Camell University, where he majored in chemistry and was also managing editor of the daily student newspaper. In 1943 he enlisted in the U.S. Army. During the
Battle of the Bulge he was captured by German troops and interned as a prisoner of war in
Dresden, where he survived the massive Allied firebombing, which killed tens of thousands of
people, mostly civilians. (The firebombingof Dresden became the central incident in Vonnegut' s
best-selling 1969 novel, Slaughterhouse-Five.) After the war, Vonnegut worked as a
reporter and later as a public relations man for General Electric in Schenectady, New York.
He quit his job in 1951 to write full-time after publishingseveral science fiction stories in national magazines. His first novel, Player Piano, appeared in 1952, followed by Sirens of
Titan (1959) and his first bestseller, Cat's Cradle (1963 )-all now considered classics of
literary science fiction. Among his many other books are Mother Night (1961), Jailbird
(1979), and a book of biographicalessays, A Man Without a Country (2005). His short
fiction is collected in Welcome to the Monkey House (1968) and Bagombo Snuff Box
(1999). Vonnegut is a singular figure in modem American fiction. An ingenious comic
writer, he combined the popular genre of science fiction with the literary tradition of dark
satire-a combination splendidly realized in "Harrison Bergeron."
:.!1() t.,hapter () . 1heme
Kurt Vonnegut
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.
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.
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.
George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel's cheeks,
but she'd forgotten for the moment what they were about.
On the television screen were ballerinas.
A buzzer sounded in George's head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from
a burglar alarm.
"That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did," said Hazel.
"Huh?" said George.
"That dance-it
was nice," said Hazel.
"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 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. 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.
George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.
Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George
what the latest sound had been.
"Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer," said
George.
"I'd think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds," said
Hazel, a little envious. "All the things they think up."
"Urn," said George.
"Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?" said Hazel.
Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a
woman named Diana Moon Glampers. "If I was Diana Moon Glampers," said Hazel,
"I'd have chimes on Sunday-just
chimes. Kind of in honor of religion."
"I could think, if it was just chimes," said George.
"Well-maybe
make 'em real loud," said Hazel. "I think I'd make a good Handi-.
capper General."
"Good as anybody else," said George.
"Who knows better'n I do what normal is?" said Hazel.
10
15
20
Jr.
"Right," said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who
was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.
"Boy!" said Hazel, "that was a doozy, wasn't it?"
It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling, and tears stood on the
rims of his red eyes. Two of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were
holding their temples.
"All of a sudden you look so tired," said Hazel. "Why don't you stretch out on
the sofa, so's you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch." She was
referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked
around George's neck. "Go on and rest the bag for a little while," she said. "I don't
care if you're not equal to me for a while."
George weighed the bag with his hands. "I don't mind it," he said. "I don't notice
it any more. It's just a part of me."
"You been so tired lately-kind
of wore out," said Hazel. "If there was just some
way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of
them lead balls. Just a few."
"Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out," said
George. "I don't call that a bargain."
"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 set around."
"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?"
"I'd hate it," said Hazel.
"There you are," said George. "The minute people start cheating on laws, what
do you think happens to society?"
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.
"Reckon it'd fall all apart," said Hazel.
"What would?" said George blankly.
"Society," said Hazel uncertainly. "Wasn't that what you just said?"
"Who knows?" said George.
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-"
He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.
"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."
"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.
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.
"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
:.!1 i
25
30
35
40
Kurt
218 Chapter 6 . Theme
Vonneglll
Jr.
~j~
T
I
government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be
regarded as extremely dangerous."
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.
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.
Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a
military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a
walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundre~ pounds.
And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a
red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white
teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.
"If you see this boy," said the ballerina, "do not-I repeat, do not-try to reason
with him."
There was the shriek of a door being tom from its hinges.
Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The
photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though
dancing to the tune of an earthquake.
George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might havefor many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. "My
God-" said George, "that must be Harrison!"
The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head.
When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone.
A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.
Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood in the center of the studio. The
knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.
"I am the Emperor!" cried Harrison. "Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody
must do what I say at once!" He stamped his foot and the studio shook.
"Even as I stand here-" he bellowed, "crippled, hobbled, sickened-I am a greater
ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!"
Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps
guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.
Harrison's scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor.
Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head
harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.
He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor,
the god of thunder.
"I shall now select my Empress!" he said, looking down on the cowering
people. "Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her
throne!"
A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.
45
50
55
.
60
Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical
handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all, he removed her mask.
She was blindingly beautiful.
"Now-" said Harrison, taking her hand, "shall we show the people the meaning
of the word dance? Music!" he commanded.
The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of
their handicaps, too. "Play your best," he told them, "and I'll make you barons and
dukes and earls."
The music began. It was normal at first-cheap,
silly, false. But Harrison
snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the
music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.
The music began again and was much improved.
Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while-listened
65
gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.
They shifted their weights to their toes.
70
Harrison placed his big hands on the girl's tiny waist, letting her sense the
weightlessness that would soon be hers.
And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!
Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the
laws of motion as well.
They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.
They leaped like deer on the moon.
75
The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer
to it.
It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling.
They kissed it.
And then, neutralizing gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended
in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.
It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the
studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor
and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.
80
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.
It was then that the Bergerons' television tube burned out.
Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone
out into the kitchen for a can of beer.
George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him
up. And then he sat down again. "You been crying?" he said to Hazel.
"Yup," she said.
85
"What about?" he said.
"I forget," she said. "Something real sad on television."
"What was it?" he said.
"It's all kind of mixed up in my mind," said Hazel.
"Forget sad things," said George.
90
"I always do," said Hazel.
"That's my girl," said George. He winced. There was the sound of a rivetting gun
in his head.
"Gee-I could tell that one was a doozy," said Hazel.
"You can say that again," said George.
"Gee-" said Hazel, "1 could tell that one was a doozy."
220 Chapter (, . Theme
Writing EIT..('tively :l:l
Questions
above you are the people dealing with the really important, beautiful issues and using
great skills and so forth. It used to be that if you were a science fiction writer you really
didn't belong in the arts at all, and other artists wouldn't talk to you. You just had this
scruffy little gang of your own.
1. argue
What for
tendencies
present-day
American
society
is Vonnegut satirizing? Does the story
anything?inHow
would you
sum up its
theme?
...
2. Is Diana Moon Glampers a "flat" or a "round" character? (If you need to review these
terms, see the discussion of character in Chapter 3.) Would you call Vonnegut's characterization of her "realistic"? If not, why doesn't it need to be?
Interviewer: What attracted you to using the form [ofscience fiction] yourself?
Vonnegut: . . . I saw a milling machine for cutting the rotors on jet engines, gas turbines. This was a very expensive thing for a machinist to do, to cut what is essentially one of those Brancusi forms. So they had a computer-operated milling
machine built to cut the blades, and I was fascinated by that. This was in 1949 and
the guys who were working on it were foreseeing all sorts of machines being run by
little boxesand punched cards. Player Piano was my response to the implications of
3. From what point of view is the story told?Why is it more effectivethan ifHarrison Bergeron
had told his own story in the first person?
4. Two sympathetic critics of Vonnegut's work, Karen and Charles Wood, have said of his
stories: "Vonnegut proves repeatedly. . . that men and women remain fundamentally the
same, no matter what technology surrounds them." Try applying this comment to "Harrison
Bergeron." Do you agree?
5. Stanislaw Lem, Polish author of Safarisand other novels, once made this thoughtful criticism of many of his contemporaries among science fiction writers:
having everything run by little boxes. The idea of doing that, you know, made
sense, perfect sense. To have a little clicking box make all the decisions wasn't a
vicious thing to do. But it was too bad for the human beings who got their dignity
from their jobs.
The revolt against the machine and against civilization, the praise of the "aesthetic"
nature of catastrophe, the dead-end course of human civikzation-these are their
foremost problems, the intellectual content of their works. Such SF is as it were a
priorivitiated by pessimism, in the sense that anything that may happen will be for
the worse. ("The Time-Travel Story and Related Matters of SF Structuring," Science
FictionStudies1 [1974J, 143-54.)
Interviewer: So science fiction seemed like the best way to write about your thoughts
on the subject.
How might Lem's objection be raised against "Harrison Bergeron"?In your opinion, does
it negate the value ofVonnegut's story?
Vonnegut: There was no avoiding it, since General Electric Company was science
fiction.
From interviews with Laurie Clancy and David Standish
THINKING ABOUT THEME
WRITING
effective(y
A clear, precise statement about a story's theme can serve as a promising thesis for a
writing assignment. After you read a short story, you will probably have some vague
sense of its theme-the
central unifying idea, or the point of the story. How do you
hone that vague sense of theme into a sharp and intriguing thesis?
Kurt VonnegutJr. on Writing
The Themes
of Science
Fiction
1971, 1973
Interviewer: You talked a lot about the difficulties you had when you first began. For instance, I think you gave one of the reasons
for using the science fiction form as the fact
that you were a professional writer and had
to do something which was popular.
Vonnegut: In the beginning I was writing
about what concerned me, and what was all
around me was machinery. I myself had had
some training in engineering and chemistry
rather than in the arts and I was working
for General Electric in a big factory city,
Schenectady. So the first book I wrote was
about Schenectady, which is full of machinery and engineers. And I was classified
as a science fiction writer. Well, in the past,
science fiction writers have been beneath
the attention of any seriouscritic. That is, far
.
Start by making a list of all the story's possible themes. If you are
discussing Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat," your list might look like this:
Man versus nature
Life-and-death struggle
Camaraderie of people in crisis
Blindness of fate
Courage in face of danger
Bravery not enough
.
Determine
which
points
seem
most
important;
then
formulate
a single
sentence in which you combine them. For Crane, you might have circled
"man versus nature," "blindness of fate," and "bravery not enough," and
your summary might be: "The central theme of 'The Open Boat' is nature's
indifference to the fate of even the most courageous individuals."
· Try to capture the story's essence in a single sentence. Remember, your
goal is to transcend a mere one-sentence plot summary. How can you clearly
express the central theme in a few words?
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
-'--