Welcome to Short Story Club. Come
on in and pull up a chair. There’s a cheese board on the piano, and there
should be a tray of Little Smokies circulating somewhere. Anyway, what did
everyone think of “Harrison Bergeron?” It’s a little different than our usual
fare, right?
I’m
not a regular reader of absurdist, dystopian, science-fiction satire, but I am an unapologetic sucker for the
fiction of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I don’t know many writers who can mix humor and
brutality as casually or effectively as he can. This story is unabashedly
campy, especially the lame joke at the end, but as is always the case with
Vonnegut, the reader is really made to think.
But
what exactly are we supposed to think
about this one? The message of this story is not the one I would have expected
from an avowed Lefty and lifelong member of the ACLU. He basically takes the
fight for universal equality to extremes (some might even say its logical conclusion)
and the result is a dystopian hell where you can see your own child gunned down
on tv and forget about it a moment later (or miss it entirely because you were
too busy making yourself a sandwich.) So it goes, I guess.
What
did the rest of you think?
