| Abstrakt: |
In "Harrison Bergeron," Kurt Vonnegut portrays a dystopia that uses prostheses to impair rather than enhance or rehabilitate. The gifted experience oppressive, normalizing measures like those American society has frequently imposed upon the "defective." Through references to "handicaps" as well as cognitive and communicative impairment, disability appears in "Harrison Bergeron" and makes visible the "rule of normalcy" that Lennard J. Davis has identified in bourgeois democracy. Such democracy required a concept of average, normal citizens represented by elected officials. As Davis explains, though, Francis Galton revised the bell curve to create a "statistical Ideal" that would promote extremes of desired traits. In Vonnegut's dystopia, Galton's intervention has not occurred, and mandatory prostheses force everyone to be normal, that is, average. The extraordinary rebel Harrison, however, offers not a liberatory movement but rather a counter-revolutionary return to feudalism. In different ways and for different reasons, Vonnegut and Davis warn against idealizing equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
