Harrison Bergeron: A Visual Representation of Equality 

By Diane Phan, Harrison Bergeron Team

            “Harrison Bergeron” is a short story written by Kurt Vonnegut. It was initially published in 1961 and then later republished in his collection of short stories titled Welcome to the Monkey House in 1968. “Harrison Bergeron” is set in the United States of America in the year 2081, a year when everything and every aspect of life is equal. This absolute equality is achieved through sets of handicaps that are forced on the public. For example, attractive people are made to wear masks in order to cover their beauty, those that have above average intelligence are made to wear earpieces that emit loud, jarring sounds at random intervals in order to force the wearer to forget what they were thinking about or lose their train of thought. The protagonist of the story is a 14-year-old boy named Harrison Bergeron, and he is above average in every way. He is attractive, athletic, strong, and a genius, so he is a threat to the equality that the government is trying to enforce. Harrison, who had been jailed due to his being a government threat, escapes and bursts into a ballet performance that is being televised. He rips of his handicaps off as well as the handicaps of one of the ballerinas. Harrison continues to run around and declare himself Emperor and pulls the ballerina to dance with him. As they dance, the Handicapper-General, the officiate who enforces all of the equality laws and handicaps, storms in and shoots the two of them dead. Harrison’s parents had been watching these events unfold on the television while their son was killed. The death of their son barely affected them though. Hazel, who has perfectly average intelligence and only thinks in small bursts, and George, who has above-average intelligence but wears the earpiece, don’t remember any of the events that have just happened because they are mentally incapable of doing so. Hazel cries over the death of her son, but promptly forgets why she had been crying in the first place.

The Harrison Bergeron Team wanted to take a piece of fiction and render it into mediums that were more visual and more interactive. One of the elements of the project was a mock documentary detailing the road to equality and the evolution it took to get to the absolute equality of 2081. The documentary consists of various pictures and clips of riots and protests along with a composed narration. The text was run through a text analysis tool called Gender Genie that analyzes whether the text was written by a male or a female. In the case of “Harrison Bergeron,” the analysis showed that the text was more female than male, but only by a margin of 4 points. This reinforces the idea of equality and because of these findings, the Project Team decided to record the narration in an androgynous, robotic voice that leaned neither towards male or female. 

One of the online text analysis tools that the text was run through was Wordle. Wordle analyzes the text input and gathers data based on the frequency of the word within the text. It then takes the 50 most common words and arranges them in a “word cloud” with the most frequent words appearing largest within the image. The prominence of words like “think,” “anybody,” “people,” and “like” implies a sort of generic quality about the people within the text. When initially analyzing the text, the Project Team came across an essay entitled “Uniformity and Deformity in “Harrison Bergeron,”” and that essay discusses how the equality shown in the story really wasn’t an attempt at making everyone equal, but it was actually making everyone the same. The essay also notes that this sort of equality is actually a stripping away any form of individuality that the people might have, and that this loss of individuality represents “the absolute deformity of humanness.” Without any sort of individual or unique characteristics, then there is no ability to call these people humans. The Wordle image that was generated reinforces this fact. “Anybody” and “people” are very broad, non-descriptive terms, and that is fitting because in the story, there isn’t anything that makes any one individual stand out, all of those unique traits have been stifled. In addition, the word “like” also mirrors this loss of individuality because it implies that each person is just the same as another one.

The results that Wordle produced led to the idea of another video, this one geared towards children. The team hypothesized that in the atmosphere of 2081, they would need to educate kids into thinking that the way the equality was set up was the way that life should be, generally brainwashing them. Therefore, the team used the prominent words that were displayed in the Wordle output to create a short and simple video that would drive the idea of everyone being equal and alike into the viewer’s head.

Another element of the educational video was the idea of the Tall Poppy Syndrome. The Tall Poppy Syndrome is a concept that is prevalent in Australia, and it is used to describe how their society had a tendency to cut down the “tall poppies” or those people who were more talented, more innovative, or in anyway better than anyone else. The Tall Poppy Syndrome promoted a level and equal society and reducing the “tall poppies” into something less. In the video that the Project Team created, there is a row of short poppies dominated by one very tall poppy. However, that tall poppy is cut down until it is the same height as the rest of the poppies. This was a very important aspect of the video, as it provides a concise, visual representation of the aggressive equality that is depicted.

Another online text analysis tool that was used was the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). This tool analyzed the text and determined the degree to which the text used different categories of words, such as social words or words with positive and negative emotions. The tool then takes these numbers and compares them to their database of texts containing personal texts, like emails and speeches, and formal texts, like books and poems. When the Project Team inputted the text into the database, there were many interesting facts found.  Figure 1 details the results that were found. The first linguistic dimension shown is self-references. These would be references that pertained to the individual and talking about oneself. The amount of self-referencing in “Harrison Bergeron” is significantly less that the personal and formal texts that are within the database. This is very telling because it shows that there is little emphasis on the individual in the text. On the other hand the social words dimension for “Harrison Bergeron” is much higher in comparison to the other texts. This sort of result was to be expected because as an absolutely equal society where everyone is the same. The positive and another dimension that produced interesting results. The results show that there is very little mention of emotion, be it positive or negative, within the text. This outcome supports the idea that the mental handicaps basically render the human unable of expressing any true emotion. One example is how Hazel doesn’t really know why she is crying, just that there was something sad that she had seen on the television. This emotionless quality was another element that was incorporated into the mock documentary through the robotic voice of the narration.

TAPoR is another website that supplies a range of text analysis. The tool that the Harrison Bergeron team used in particular was the Visual Collocator. The Visual Collocator analyzes word pairs within the text and outputs them based on frequency of appearance within the text. In the case of the Visual Collocator, a single word extracted from the original text is entered within the data field, and TAPoR generates a visual image of the word and all of its related word pairs. The inputted word is placed in the center, and “spokes” connect the center word to the companion words within the word pair.

            The prevailing theme within the text of “Harrison Bergeron” is that of equality. Because of this, the Project Team decided to input the word “equal” to see if the text analysis tool would extrapolate a deeper understanding of the theme of equality in the text. As seen in Figure 2, the words with the tan backgrounds are the most common words paired with the word “equal.” The word “finally” is one of those words, and that word stood out as being significant to the Project Team. The word implies that the equality that was achieved within the text wasn’t instantaneous, and that there were long years of struggle and fighting in order to get the equality that is depicted in the text. Imagining this long road to equality inspired the Harrison Bergeron Team to render the text into a pseudo-documentary that displayed the struggles and the evolution of equality in the world of “Harrison Bergeron.”

            “Weren’t” is another word that is associated with “equal,” and this word pair could imply various different interpretations. When looking at the phrase “weren’t equal” within the context of the original story, it could imply that the world inside the story isn’t equal, and that they are striving to change that. That would be the most straightforward interpretation of the word pair, but the Project Team chose to look at it a different way. Because TAPoR and all text analysis tools only looks at the text as a set of discrete words and not at the context that the words are in, the Project Team chose to view the word pair as a descriptor of the overall essence and tone of the work, and as a commentary of the writing itself. The story clearly describes their equal society, but as educated readers, the Project Team and other readers can see that the absolute equality that is portrayed is meant to be viewed in a satirical fashion. So in this case, the word pair indicates the viewer’s interpretation of the text. The equal society that is shown in “Harrison Bergeron” is so absurd in its absolute and unbending view of equality that the reader knows that that sort of equality isn’t really equal.

            Another word noted is “law.” The implication with this word paired with equal is that laws, rules and regulations are a necessary measure to keep the peace and keep things equal in the story. It’s a sentiment that is echoed within the text with the mentions of various constitutional amendments that are put in place to establish absolute equality, as well as all of the physical and tangible handicaps that the people must wear. Within the text, George notes that “the minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?” (Vonnegut), reinforcing the notion that it is the laws that keep everyone in line and equal.

            The distinction of law as an important concept in the text led to the last multimedia element of the project, the Handicapper-General’s website. The Handicapper-General is essentially the sole entity who maintains equality in “Harrison Bergeron.” The team thought that it was important to take a look at the foundation behind the absolute equality. The website contains blog posts explaining the amendments. In the text, it is noted that amendments 211, 212, and 213 were the amendments that finally created the equality that they were striving for. Because of this, the team thought it was important to flesh out those amendments in order to create a fuller and more robust view of the world of “Harrison Bergeron.”

The Harrison Bergeron Project was not a project that wanted to only analyze the text on a purely academic level. The Project Team wanted to create a few multimedia aspects that were geared towards showing not only what the text explicitly said, but also what the text implied, the essence of the story, so to speak. The obvious satirical undertones led to equally satirical videos and images that display the absurdity of an absolute equality. The Harrison Bergeron Project was more of an adaptation of the work itself while using multiple text analysis tools to color and affect the way the items were created.