![]() You can find several prescriptions for reading (and teaching) this story, but they tend to break off into two major categories, depending on whether you think Vonnegut is just being clever and wry, or if he’s actually winking at the reader, creating a situation that is more nuanced than it seems at first blush. What are the conventional interpretations of the story? Q: Textbooks and reading guides generally offer variations on two basic readings of the story. Vonnegut has that power because he’s wise, funny, and ingratiating, and far too kind to condescend or sermonize. I feel most rewarded when the indifferent or lethargic or prematurely jaded student suddenly sits up, takes a sip of coffee, and picks a side, whatever it is. And of course there are always the cadres of liberal-minded students ready to disagree, and the two parties make foils of one another. Most of them feel informed and many of them are informed, but I’m sure how many understand the difference. They’re young, so they’re still critical and enthusiastic, and at least moderately anti-establishment, but they’re also the first generation to have grown up with FOX News on in the living room, exposed to a media model that overthrew the golden age of evening news by conflating journalism with informed opinion. When it comes to “Harrison Bergeron” they are ready to pounce on an illustration of the folly of Affirmative Action, wealth redistribution, entitlements, you name it. ![]() There’s this stereotype that kids are blank slates before they’re “brainwashed” by their liberal professors, but I have to say I’ve had some pretty compelling conversations with young people about Warren Buffet and Ayn Rand, and how nominally atheistic literary and philosophical veins like realism and existentialism can nonetheless accommodate the basic fundamentals of Christianity. Q: What are some of the most common student responses to the story?Ī: Most of my students come from rural and suburban Texas, and they’re often politically conservative, whether they’re quite staunch or fairly tepid about it. There is also the disquieting terror of seeing a lost child erased from his parents’ memory, which has to click, if only on a preconscious level, with young people who have recently left home for the first time. Also, because my young students still carry a residue of their teenage years, they’re very keen to notice unfairness, and the failings of well-intended authority figures, because they still bear fresh marks from the trauma of surviving late childhood in the households of their terribly human parents. It’s one of the many reasons literature- especially fiction-needs to be taught heavily in high school and college. Even if they don’t know it, they have been developing a personalized and reliable moral and philosophical framework from which they get a kind of pleasure by testing it against challenging stories. They’ve just made this tremendous, terrifying leap from a small, knowable world into a cosmos of uncertainty. Most of my students are underclassmen, between 18 and 20. Why is that?Ī: I think partly it’s their age. Q: In your essay you write that “Harrison Bergeron” always resonates with students. Reed shared his thoughts with The Daily Vonnegut. In his 2015 essay “Technologies of Amnesia: Teaching ‘Harrison Bergeron’ to the Millennial Generation” (published in Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice), Benjamin Reed, a writer and lecturer at Texas State University, examines the different interpretations of the story and his experiences teaching it to undergraduates. It is also available online.Ī staple of high school and college anthologies, “Harrison Bergeron” is for many students their “first” Vonnegut. ![]() Anyone who has not yet read the story can find it in Vonnegut’s collection, Welcome to the Monkey House. ![]() Reed describes the story as “vintage Vonnegut …extremely funny while at the same time touching on several serious social issues.” While often read as a satire on forced equality, the story is complex enough to merit interpretations across the political spectrum. In The Short Fiction of Kurt Vonnegut, Peter J. Originally published in 1961 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, “Harrison Bergeron” is Kurt Vonnegut’s most well-known story. ![]()
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