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Characters In Harrison Bergeron

Decent Essays

Have you ever been told you can’t do something because you are too qualified? In Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron” this is what America has turned into in 2081. Vonnegut uses characters in his story to show the effects of a truly “equal” society with what happens when they want everyone equal and what happens to some of their health. Some of the characters he uses are Harrison, George, and the ballerinas.

In the short story, Harrison is used to showing what happens when you aren’t like the others in other words “average”. Harrison is forced to wear weights, glasses, earphones, rubber nose, and teeth caps that try to handicap him so that he is “average”. “Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a …show more content…

This is very detrimental to his and everyone that wears one's health. This cause hearing damage, and no sleep from constantly blaring noises. The effects could go as far as making them deaf which at that point the government would put cochlear implants to make you hear because not being hearing would mean that you are different and not “normal”.

The last example would be the ballerinas. The ballerinas have experienced what it’s like to try to be in sports in a society that you are meant to be equal in. There is no competition or individuality. No competition means that there will be no drive to become better than the others. Also, no individuality means there was nobody prettier than the other girls, and nobody was better than anybody else “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.”(95-99) “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.”(160-162)This all will affect their health too. How they stopped the girls from being any better than anyone was with more weights so that it would be harder to do ballet also very bad for their joints and their muscles because

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