Compare And Contrast Harrison Bergeron And Anthem

onPatrick Mills
24, October 2012
Singleton
English II Honors Should individuality and knowledge ever be suppressed? Some people might think so in order to create a more socially “equal” world. However if society were to act in such a way it would cause a major step back in the development that people have worked so hard to achieve. After all, isn’t it every country’s goal to find new advancements to better life in today’s modern civilization? In some parts of the globe there are governments that attempt to limit and control their country’s people both physically and mentally. Both Ayn Rand and Kurt Vonnegut imply how if these governments were taken to such an extreme level of totalitarianism it would crumble that government’s people in their stories Anthem and “Harrison Bergeron”. Physically handicapping people is the number one way to enslave them, as dictated by
Rand and Vonnegut.
In Anthem the workers are held to a tight schedule “when the bell rings we rise from our beds…half-hour while we dress and eat breakfast…then we go to work…in five hours we return to eat our midday meal…five more hours we return for our dinner…then we walk in a straight line for the social meeting” (Rand 27). This kind of schedule is similar to that of a prison routine, which enforces the thought that they are enslaved. Keeping the workers to this kind of agenda also gives them no freedom of choice or any reason to be excited when they wake up in the morning. Another way that the Council enslaves the people in the city is “The Great Transgression of Preference, to love any among men better than the other, since we must love all men and all men are our friends” (Rand 30). Not being able to have friends makes the people in this fantasy society feel alone and unable to share
anything that they are feeling. The Transgression of Preference limits any kind of personal relationship and also keeps him from legally having affections towards any woman and finding happiness in that kind of a bond. Similar to Anthem, the short story “Harrison Bergeron” shows physically handicapping people by the “forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George’s neck (Vonnegut 2). This act maintains George in a constant state of fatigue which, like Equality, keeps him from any state of physical satisfaction. The sack symbolizes chains that would be around a prisoner limiting their freedom by restricting them in place. While physically handicapping someone is a good start to enslaving them, it is not the only way, nor the strongest way in destroying them. While disabling somebody physically is crucial in enslaving their person, in order to completely destroy someone it is essential to capture their freedom of mind. In Anthem, there lies an issue that the students are not gaining any knowledge, but being taught false knowledge as “the earth is flat and that the sun revolves around it…how to bleed men to cure them” (Rand 23). This exemplifies the first substantially noticeable fault in the society’s “schools”, it shows that for some reason the teachers are feeding the children false information which provokes many questions in the reader’s mind. It also symbolizes the corruption of the schools by constraining the mental advancement of the learners which is critical in the head of Equality because he later discovers this when he reads through the manuscripts he finds in the sewers causing him to realize the teachers are lying. Not only is false information being given, but new information is highly discouraged as when Equality presents his glass box to the Council and “’this thing,’ they said, ‘must be destroyed’”(Rand 74). This illustrates Equality’s frustrations because he shows his glorious box that he knows will better society to them and they offer no second thought than to do away with it. This is also the first hands-on experience that Equality has in observing the Council’s unethical ways causing him to burst out with rage that leads to the climax of the story. In “Harrison Bergeron” the people are forcibly mentally handicapped for when there are people, like George, that have higher intelligences that might be worse off because when he tries to think he “didn’t get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts” (Vonnegut 1). Similar, but not identical, to Anthem they are preventing mental freedom, except in “HB” a much more barbaric method is used which makes the people literally unable to process full thoughts. This is a poor attempt to “equalize” people and symbolizes yet more chains being put on what reality would call a gift, this society views as a curse. Taking away a person’s ability to think entirely breaks them down as a being and transforms them into a brainwashed slave.
By comprehending both Rand and Vonnegut’s stories, it can be understood why it would be catastrophic to enslave not only people’s bodies, but also their minds. This subject is of huge importance in today’s world because people need to be encouraged to think and express themselves. What makes a person a person is their ability to reason, and to reason is to think, and by stripping humans of their thoughts wouldn’t that mean that they are being stripped of their own being? These stories show that equality should be observed, not enforced.