Question

HARRISON BERGERON

Answer 1

Annotate the short story for main ideas, plot, and characterization.

Answer 2

I've done annotations, but the plot and story characterization is confusing.

Answer 3

bro i got you

Answer 4

just did this

Answer 5

I love Harrison Bergeron! Gimme something to work with though.

Answer 6

what do u mean by that? My answer?

Answer 7

or the story I was directed to read?

Answer 8

I mean specify something you want me to work on and I'll help you. As it is, that's a lot to sort through 😂

Answer 9

Oh the characterization part like the details given about each character that contributed to the plot etc. I'm just having a hard to coming up with an answer for that

Answer 10

SO you need something to write about on that person?

Answer 11

Story:

HARRISON BERGERON
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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."
"Um," 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 Handicapper General."
"Good as anybody else," said George.
"Who knows better than I do what normal is?" said Hazel.
"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 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 sit 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 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 born 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 hundred 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 torn 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 have - for 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.
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 gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.
They shifted their weights to their toes.
Harrison placed his big hands on the girls 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.
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, neutraling 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.
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.
"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.
"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, "I could tell that one was a doozy."

Answer 12

Okay, well. This is gonna take a while cause I tend to rant about stuff like this
First let's highlight the main characters.
For example, the titular character Harrison Bergeron represents a multitude of things - rebellion, power (this can be seen as good OR bad depending), egotism ... but most importantly, the drive for freedom. In some films he is represented as wanting to fit in but he can't, until they try to literally stifle everything about his existence and that's when he gets mad. In other media portrayals he's a rebel/outlier off the bat (I mean he is already considering he has to get thrown in prison etc.) and the totalitarian regime is trying to stop him from basically airing their dirty laundry* to the rest of society. Case in point being the ending, when he hits a button that broadcasts the whole situation to national (?) television, including the part where Diana Moon Glampers shoots both Harrison and his temporary dance partner dead.

*Not that it matters considering everyone is artificially or naturally handicapped to make everyone "equal" - yeah, they see the tragedy happen, but everyone forgets about it. Moving on from there...

Answer 13

Hazel Bergeron (the mom) would represent the natural ideology of what they want to be the norm in this dystopian society. She is mild, shallow (not by her own faults because well, she's mentally handicapped by genetics) and unassuming. In some media portrayals she actually sees her son get shot but ten seconds later or whatever she forgets about it, because she's vapid (scatterbrained?) like that. A lot of sources that describe this story mention that for some reason Hazel and the boss lady (Diana Moon Glampers) have a very similar resemblance, which could point to the fact that Hazel represents the ideal norm.

George Bergeron is basically like Harrison but he consents/bows to the rules of the society they live in because he's afraid. He's got mental and physical handicaps and even refuses to take them off temporarily when his wife (the "dumb" one!!) offers out of compassion because he's afraid of the consequences. So he might possibly represent the aura of rebellion that gets tempered by fear of authority retaliation - which is doubly emphasized in media portrayals where HE sees his son die, but the stupid mental feedback thing disrupts his thought process and he forgets the whole thing.

TL;DR Hazel represents the natural adherence to the ideology and George represents forced adherence. Kinda.

Answer 14

Characterization is a writer’s tool, or “literary device” that occurs any time the author uses details to teach us about a person. This is used over the course of a story in order to tell the tale.

In “Harrison Bergeron,” Vonnegut suggests that total equality is not an ideal worth striving for, as many people believe, but a mistaken goal that is dangerous in both execution and outcome. To achieve physical and mental equality among all Americans, the government in Vonnegut’s story tortures its citizens. The beautiful must wear hideous masks or disfigure themselves, the intelligent must listen to earsplitting noises that impede their ability to think, and the graceful and strong must wear weights around their necks at all hours of the day. The insistence on total equality seeps into the citizens, who begin to dumb themselves down or hide their special attributes. Some behave this way because they have internalized the government’s goals, and others because they fear that the government will punish them severely if they display any remarkable abilities. The outcome of this quest for equality is disastrous. America becomes a land of cowed, stupid, slow people. Government officials murder the extremely gifted with no fear of reprisal. Equality is more or less achieved, but at the cost of freedom and individual achievement.

url(https://www.sparknotes.com/short-stories/harrison-bergeron/themes/)

Answer 15

does that help?

Answer 16

adherence = sticking to. Basically like a post-it which is an adhesive piece of paper.

Answer 17

Well, based off that analogy, we can say Hazel is a piece of tape and George is a sticky note. You can put tape on anything and it'll stick but you have to press on a sticky note to make sure it stays there - and even then the sticky part could get old and fall off.

Hopefully that clears things up

Answer 18

Oh, ok so his mom was a representation of the normal people and his dad was a representation of what they do to those in the community who are seen as not average / and have an advantage in life bc of it? They are basically just examples?

Answer 19

I'm sorry if I don't understand it, the story is just confusing

Answer 20

well - quote on quote "normal" since it's obviously flawed but that's what society has been indoctrinated/brainwashed to accept as normal

Answer 21

ok

Answer 22

The difference between Hazel and George is basically natural conformity vs. forced conformity

Are you gonna slap that square into the circle or are you gonna be the circle? (I hope that made sense LOL)

Answer 23

Kinda, I'm still not understanding this

Answer 24

And then Harrison would be the minecraft TNT because he's a square but if you hit the TNT it blows up.

aka rebellion

Answer 25

Ye, I'm sorry if its a pain but I'm still not fully comprehending this.


I'm reading back at what u said, I just don't get it

Answer 26

The basis of the plot btw: It shows how we're all being brainwashed by "normality" to the point that when people act out in rebellion it doesn't make a mark long enough to actually change things.

Case in point, everyone saw Harrison and his whole ballerina thing but the handicaps put on them by society made 'em all forget in no time. Since they don't remember anything, nothing changed

Answer 27

Okay what don't you get? Not a bad thing, I kinda just went off anyway so I gotchu

Answer 28

@Hoodmemes doesn't get it

Answer 29

The character build-up meaning.


I see what u mean by how Hazel was defined as "normal" and she had some short term thought process, but George wasn't like that and was an advanced thinker so those of "higher power" tried to make him equal by putting a device in his ear to make his forget his thoughts every 20 seconds so he couldn't take advantage of others n' stuff.


But like how does that connect to the plot I see how George connects since he is deemed as somewhat not right but how is Hazel and her 14 yr old son connecting to that plot? What is her 14 yr old son's characterization bc I didn't understand it from those few lines where he was included?

Answer 30

Well, to sum things up -
Hazel represents the norm, George represents being forced to be the norm (i.e. his handicaps), and Harrison is basically the same thing as George except he doesn't listen to the authority

Answer 31

The whole plot technically runs along Harrison trying to defy authority but since society is so buzzed up on what's "normal" they don't even let it sink in, they'll have forgotten in the next minute

Answer 32

I seemingly get it now kinda, thank you.

Answer 33

Ok no problem, lemme know if you need anything else.
btw, found this really good source about themes in the story, might help clarify stuff

Answer 34

tysm again!

Answer 35

😄