Abstract

“Harrison Bergeron”, a short story of Kurt Vonnegut, describes a broken family, a tyrannical government and a great resistance with a tragic ending. The writer adopts black humour and the writing technique of post-modernism to present a dystopian world, apparently absolutely equal but in essence under an extremely tyrannical control. In this brilliant piece of work, he expresses doubt about the value of Utopia and his worries about alienation, social control and identity crisis. 

The thesis makes an overall analysis and study of the dystopian world and the characters in “Harrison Bergeron” to explore Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian political and social critique. The thesis is divided into five chapters. The research subject is introduced in the first chapter. The second chapter introduces the literature review on Kurt Vonnegut and dystopian literature, including the aims and significance of the thesis. The third chapter gives an overview of the source text — “Harrison Bergeron”. In the first part of this chapter, “equality” and social control in the society in 2081 are analysed. And the next part focuses on the characters, especially Harrison and his parents George and Hazel. The fourth chapter analyzes Vonnegut’s political and social critique presented in “Harrison Bergeron” as well as the underlying hope in this piece of work. The fifth chapter makes a conclusion of the whole thesis that total equality is harmful and unacceptable for a society and we must avoid the tragedy of dystopia in“Harrison Bergeron”.

Key words: “Harrison Bergeron”, Vonnegut, Dystopia, social control, equality