Compare/contrast Fahrenheit 451 and Harrison Bergeron

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The Fear of Utopia

Compare works of literature to Fahrenheit 451 that express a universal theme and provide evidence to support the ideas expressed in each work.

Fahrenheit 451 and Harrison Bergeron are two literary works with two completely different plots. Fahrenheit 451 is about a fireman who supports the government and goes astray; and Harrison Bergeron is about two people that watch a peculiar event on television. However, both stories share a common idea What if everyone was the same? Both societies build a bizarre sense of equality.

Equality is something Americans want and supposedly have. The governments in Fahrenheit 451 and Harrison Bergeron take advantage of this desire for equality and use it to oppress the people without them even knowing it. The fantasy of equality appeals to the people because it gives them a false sense of security in that no one would be superior to them. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. (Fahrenheit 451, p. 58) The government knew this and one major way to keep them all equal, was to keep everyone at a low intelligence level. Not everyone [is] born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. (Fahrenheit 451, p. 58) Fahrenheit 451 destroyed all forms of intellectual education by burning books, while Harrison Bergeron imposed handicaps to prevent a person from thinking. Obviously, as illustrated in both books, it is much easier to make the sharp people dull, rather than making less gifted individuals more intelligent. This also keeps them on a very short leash. It did not take much to keep them in check.

By making everyone equal, the government had also eliminated the element of competition. Diversity keeps everyone in competition. Without competition, the human progression would be much slower and may not even happen at all. In Harrison Bergeron, no one thought of any knew ideas; no one was better than anyone else. …and pretty soon we'd be right back to the Dark Ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else (Harrison Bergeron, p. 16, Elements of Literature Third Course) The same problem of vicissitude is in Fahrenheit 451. With people mindlessly watching television all day, no one had their minds on anything else. The absence of versatility kept them from trying to be better than one another. They didnt think of anything new. Nothing progressed, nothing happened, and no one cared.

The governments in the two stories take different approaches to creating this type of society. The governing body in Fahrenheit 451 banned books and accelerated the pace of ordinary life. Citizens basically had no time to think, as Faber explains on page 84 of the Fahrenheit 451 text. Off-hours, yes. But time to think? If youre not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you cant think of anything else but the danger, then youre playing some game or sitting in some room where you cant argue with the four-wall televisor. The television is also used a weapon of mass destruction. The television, also known as the parlor, seems to reduce the human mind into a mush, with the consistency similar to oatmeal. All of the different technology built by this new generation was bent towards keeping the mind distracted on useless garbage and keeping people away from intellectual activities.

In Harrison Bergeron, the government used a different approach to provide this perverse sense of equality. In this alternate future of man, handicaps imposed by the government make everyone equal. The severity of each of these handicaps depended on how strong their good traits were. For example, if one were born with a sharp mind, an ear-piece was inserted into your ear that gave an earsplitting noise approximately every 0 seconds to prevent you from thinking on one subject for a enough time for one to develop a strong opinion for something. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn't be handicapped. But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts. (Harrison Bergeron, p. 14) Instead of burning books, they made it virtually impossible for anyone to read one. If one was beautiful, it would be required to wear a hideous mask at all times. With all these handicaps enforced, no one had the capacity to even think of resisting. Eventually, a character tried to oppose the law in the story, but was immediately shot down. When the shocked people witnessed this, a loud ring went through their ear-pieces, leaving them with no memory of the events that took place.

The government is supposed to keep everyone in society happy. The people want equality, but what happens when it goes too far? Both authors ponder this while exploring and probing America's fantasy/nightmare. When does equality eventually impose on our constitutional rights or even our fundamental rights (the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness)? When does equality and democracy turn into communism? Could our world end up like the ones in the books? Could our world fog up with ambiguity and turn black and white? When will we forget about the moon?

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