Breaking Down Vonnegut by Julia A. Whitehead

Author:Julia A. Whitehead [Julia A. Whitehead]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119746157
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2022-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

Use of a ten-gauge shotgun was low tech for a sci-fi story, considering these guns were first used in the United States in the late 1800s. With exceptionally intelligent individuals being dulled by the government transmitters, there may have been no ability to imagine and create new technology in Vonnegut's created future. Diana Moon Glampers could have jailed Harrison and the ballerina, but instead she chose a method of swift deterrence. She made an example of them. The confusion for many with this story may result from what Vonnegut didn't say rather than what he did say.

At some point while the two were watching television, George went to the kitchen momentarily and returned to find Hazel had been crying. She didn't know why she had been crying. The reader knew she cried because she witnessed the TV reportage of her son Harrison's murder by the Handicapper General along with the murder of a ballerina.

Television news, newspapers, and magazine headlines leading up to the time during which Vonnegut wrote this story often focused on escalating violence against African Americans, as well as violence in other areas of the world from Vietnam to Algeria.

While legislation related to Americans with disabilities did not come until many years after Civil Rights Legislation for minorities and women, it is impossible to place “Harrison Bergeron” in its proper framework without understanding the historical backdrop during which it was written. A review of several moments in the struggle for civil rights legislation, which coincided with Vonnegut's writing, is necessary to better understand this story. This is not a complete list, but these events shed light:

1948: President Harry Truman ended segregation in the military.

1954: A Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, ended racial segregation in public schools.

1955: 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi for “flirting with a white woman.”

1955: Rosa Parks refused to move from her bus seat, leading to the Montgomery bus boycott.

1957: Black leaders united in ending segregation and racial discrimination met to organize nonviolent protests.

1957: President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to Arkansas to support the integration of nine black students into Little Rock High School.

1960: The first “sit-in” occurred in North Carolina when four black college students refused to leave a lunch counter without being served. George Wallace, who had failed at his attempt to run for the position of Alabama governor, was mounting a new campaign backed by the Ku Klux Klan. Segregationists like Wallace were doubling down to prevent continued efforts to pass civil rights legislation.

1961: “Harrison Bergeron” was published in October.

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