"Harrison Bergeron" - Wu

Hi, Allison Wu here. “Harrison Bergeron” reads as an amnesiac account of what was. The stunts in memory that the characters’ receive through their forced handicaps, stand as a metaphor for the loss of humanity and just as somberly, the loss of self. I see this metaphor even trickling down to the loss of selves within oneself – as each human embodies many selves within their one identity of “I”. What I mean by this is how every human has multiple selves like how a person can be mother, daughter, worker, and artist simultaneously. The story as a whole speaks to this mourning of losing one’s identity and the particular identities that form that identity. Vonnegut’s use of interrupting the prose with statements like, “A siren was going off in his head” (Vonnegut, 2), provide a sense of loss of thought and thus, loss of individuality. The story never allows us to fully form an attachment to these characters in a way because we are cut off from the developing attachment through interruptions, just as the characters are interrupted and prevented from developing attachments to their identity. Just as intellectually the characters are unable to be their full selves, emotionally we see the characters’ inability to acknowledge their full emotional self. We are only left with the afterthought of emotion and the afterthought of sparks of genius, as the tracks of tears on a cheek are our only evidence of what was once a human experience.