Writing Assignment

on

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s "Harrison Bergeron"

 

There is a Study Guide to this story.  You should work your way through it before attempting this writing assignment.

At first glance, this story might seem to be a sneering attack on the political value of "equality." At the same time, the story seems to place a high value on, for example, intelligence.  But a little reflection -- a little employment of our own intellect upon the story -- will get us into some uncomfortable muddles. 

Isn't inequality a bad thing? 

Doesn't inequality lie at the root of an immense amount of suffering in the world?  Is Vonnegut saying that people should just resign themselves to this, and stop trying to fight it? 

Was the French Revolution misguided when it adopted the slogan of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"?  Should it have just been "Liberty, Fraternity"?  Are we perhaps even to understand Vonnegut to be saying in effect that it should have been just "Freedom"?

Were the signers of the American Declaration of Independence just a bunch of fools when they endorsed the proposition that "We hold these truths to be self-evident:  that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"?

And how about happiness?  Is it necessarily degrading to seek it, or to try to make it more available to others?  And isn't being "well-adjusted" an important element of happiness?

Isn't it right to teach our children that people should obey laws?  And shouldn't we obey them?

Is there no such thing as "unfair competition"?  And if there is, is government regulation always a bad way to try to address it?  Is Vonnegut one of those who thinks the government has no business meddling in the economy?

Would golf among friends be a better thing if we did away with handicapping?

What is wrong with the idiot Hazel's maxim that "Trying is the important thing"?  Is being the best the only important thing?  Is trying not important?

After a while, we may even start to get a little nervous!  We've got all these muddles:  does that mean our own intellects are examples of what Vonnegut seems to be mocking as "average intelligence"? (1)  Are we doomed by our genes to be stupid, whereas the really brilliant -- the only ones worth admiring -- enjoy their brilliance simply a gift of nature?  Hmm.  That certainly would be sad.  Maybe George has a point at the end:  "Forget sad things."  Maybe we should just go get a beer, or flick on the tube.

And then again, maybe not.  Maybe the difference between competent and incompetent intellect is not that some people just see things clearly and some just don't.  Maybe muddles are not so foreign to competent thinkers after all.  Maybe these folks are in fact quite familiar indeed with intellectual confusion.  Maybe they just happen to have developed some ways of dealing with muddles that enable them, eventually, to arrive at clarity.  Maybe this art is something that can be picked up by anyone who's not really and truly "intellectually lame" (afflicted by Down's Syndrome, for example, and other quite definite and clinically specific conditions).

It does seem, though, that something we might call sustained attention is a necessary prerequisite to thinking things through effectively enough to figure out how one might want to adjust one's notions in order to pass to a new level of clarity.  Even here, though, we'd want to get clear!  It's one thing to not be able even to recall an idea after 20 seconds; it would be another to say that nothing worthwhile can be accomplished if we can't keep everything present before consciousness for hours at a time!  Besides, one of the great advantages of using writing as an occasion for thinking is that we can freeze our ideas in a draft, which we can then check over later to see if things we originally thought actually fit together.

Let's work on the assumption that Vonnegut's story is dressed to the likes of us, instead of to some impossible intellectual elite, or to some clique of geniuses, and that it's not aimed at driving us to despair, but at stimulating us to think in ways that "the world of 2081" in the story would make impossible for us.

Allocate several hours to working up as good a provisional draft as you can on one of the following topics.  You'll already be taking your initial ideas -- the ones that made for your initial muddle -- through a fair amount of tinkering.  What you end up with is something that you'll want to review one of these days after you've re-read the story.  (Perhaps you'd like eventually to call it to the attention of some of your friends.)  Meanwhile, you'll get some practice in revising whatever the phrases and sentences and paragraphs you start out with in your very first draft (which is not the one you'll be handing in).  In particular, you will be practicing the art of imagining possible distinctions and evaluating their potential relevance in a particular context. 

Caution:  All of these topics require you to talk about facts recognizable in today's American society.  But do not let this distract you from the necessity to discuss these with specific reference to the facts of the story to which you are relating them, whether by comparison or contrast.

Caution (repeated!!!):  All of these topics require you to talk about facts recognizable in today's American society.  But be sure  to discuss these with specific reference to the facts of the story to which you are relating them, whether by comparison or contrast.  Your job, after all, is to interpret the story.  You need not hide your own view on the issues the story raises, but the task here is to show how the story raises those issues, and how it indicates (indirectly, by subtle clues) we might decide them (or ought not decide them).

Notes

what Vonnegut seems to be mocking as "average intelligence":  Don't overlook the force of "seems" here.  Part of the game of certain kinds of fiction is that the author sets us up for a first impression that eventually we are expected to diagnose as false.  (That doesn't mean we were fools for having adopted the first impression we did.  After all, the author intended us to do so. [We would have been incompetent readers if we did not!]  But it does mean that we've stopped short if we don't eventually get beyond it.)  Here again we should recall what should by now be your default caution:  narrators are not authors!  Even when the narrator is not a character within the action of the story, but a disembodied voice conveying the events to us, it is something the author has created, made up, constructed.  It is a device, no less a creature of the author than a character.  In the passage at hand, the narrator may be simply articulating the point of view of the society at large that is under portrayal.  That is:  Hazel's intelligence is what Hazel and George recognize as "average" because that is what their world describes as "average."  But are the descriptions of this vast propaganda machine to be taken at face value?  Surely not by the story's readers, who are supposed to recognize the ways of thinking on display here as derangements.  The kind of thinking on exhibit with Hazel, which is taken (by Hazel) as a "natural fact" (level of inborn talent) which everything else is to be "dumb-downed" to, may be every bit as much a cultural construct, a fabrication, as what George is reduced to being capable of, under his earphones.  (The inanities on display are not confined, either, to the Hazels:  George coughs up a fare number of them, too.)  If competent thinking on the level of active skill is a matter of cultivation as well as natural talent, then what constitutes "average intelligence" in practice will not be a matter of IQ (even if we buy into the disputed idea that IQ tests actually do measure "native intelligence").  As folks who think of ourselves as people of average intelligence, we are surely expected to react to the idea of Hazel's performance being "average" as an insult to our intelligence!  But that doesn't mean that the insult is Vonnegut's:  perhaps he's paying our intelligence the compliment of relying on it as capable of detecting that it comes from not from him but from the derangement he is concocting for our inspection.  Return.

  Consult the Study Guide to this story before attempting this writing assignment.

  Suggestions are welcome.  Please send your comments to lyman@ksu.edu .

      Contents copyright © 2000 by Lyman A. Baker. 

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  This page last updated 09 November 2000.