The short story ”Harrison Bergeron” fantasizes how the world will look like in the future(2081), when everyone is forced to be equal. Everyone who is smarter, stronger, quicker or better looking than an average person, has to wear handicappers – radios to interfere smart one’s thougts, heavy bags to slow down strong and quick people, and ugly masks for beautiful people. The system is monitored by the US Handicapper General Diana Moon Glampers, whose duty is to make sure that everyone follows the equalizing legislation. And of course there is extremly hard punishments for those who doesn’t follow the laws.
The main characters of the short story are George Bergeron, his wife Hazel Bergeron and their son Harrison. In our time George would probably represent an average person, but in this short story he is forced to wear a handicap radio in his ear and a handicap bag around his neck. Hazel represents the average person of this short story – she is so unintelligent, that she can’t think about the same thing more than few seconds. Their son, Harrison, is extremely smart, handsome and strong. He is so perfect, that the government was afraid of him – perhaps the govenment thought that he would be leader the resistance movement or perhaps they thought that it would be easier take him to the jail. Anyway, Harrison escaped from jail and went to the studio and released people from their handicaps in live tv-show in order to show that they would be happier without handicaps. The story doesn’t tell why did Harrison does this – did he notice the errors of the system or did he just want to be better than everybody else.
The government is described as a ruthless system, which doesn’t care about freedom and human rights. The main issue of the story is the relationship between the government and the citizens – if citizens don’t question the laws, laws become habits. And in the story George and Hazel are used to the handicap-system – George thinks that the handicaps are a part of him and he thinks that society would fall apart if people start cheating on laws, and they would slip back to ”dark ages” of competition. So the story is defensive statement for peoples freedom and capitalism.