Was Kurt Vonnegut on to something in Harrison Bergeron?”
According to all commentary on Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” the theme of this satire is that attempts to achieve equality are absurd. For example, Peter Reed says it “satirizes an obsession with equalizing …” (29). The critics have taken this text’s absurd future utopia as representative of egalitarianism. For example, Stanley Schatt claims that “in any leveling process, what really is lost, according to Vonnegut, is beauty, grace, and wisdom” (133). But the object of Vonnegut’s satire is not all leveling–“any leveling process” that might arise. Rather, the object of his satire is the popular misunderstanding of what leveling and equality entail. More specifically, this text satirizes America’s Cold War misunderstanding of not just communism but also socialism. To argue that thesis, this article begins outside of the text by situating it in Vonnegut’s oeuvre: his fiction, nonfiction, speeches, and interviews. Then this contextualization will attend to Vonnegut’s audience. Fi
