Comparing Harrison Bergeron to “Harrison Bergeron”

            “Harrison Bergeron” is a story about a dystopian world where everyone wears “handicaps” of weight and thought interrupting devices. The idea behind the story is while it may be good to have everyone be made equal, we need to be careful not to make everyone the same. This cautionary short story was written as if we only know half of the story, bringing it to great fame. Because of this, a movie was made that filled in all of the gaps and created a more complete story. However, to fill in the gaps, many differences from the short story had to be added to the film. While some similarities naturally remained, the differences ended up outweighing the similarities.

            To be sure, the short story and movie versions of Harrison Bergeron share considerable similarities. An example of this is Harrison’s mom. In the short story, she sustains a less than average intelligence, and has a very poor memory. At the end of both versions, she watches her son kill himself on TV, but almost immediately forgets and goes on living life as normal. Also, in both stories the exceptionally gifted people are handicapped to bring them back down to average; it is believed that this needs to happen to prevent rebellion. Another similarity to both forms of the story is the organization in charge of the handicapping. This organization monitors and performs the handicapping for the whole country. Finally, at the end of both of the stories, Harrison dies for his cause, which is to rid of the handicapping for everyone. To sum up, although the movie has many differences that lengthen the movie, there are also similarities. Without these similarities, the story would not be “Harrison Bergeron” at all.

            In spite of this, there are far more differences than similarities. This is a result of the need for a short story to be a full length movie. For example, at the beginning of the movie, it is discovered that Harrison has a brother. In the short story, a younger brother is never mentioned, and may be non-existent. Also, the movie depicts Harrison in school attempting to be “average”. The story has a Harrison who for the whole story is against everyone being average. Another example of a difference between the two stories is instead of being imprisoned by the handicappers in the beginning, which is written in the story, Harrison is recruited by them to help them with their operations. In the film, Harrison agrees to work with them, and controls the television stations. This is the opposite of the short story, where he is completely opposed to the organization. In conclusion, although there are some similarities, the differences dominate the two stories.

            The creators of the movie version of Harrison Bergeron set out to fill in the gaps that confused many readers of the short story. Although successfully completing this task, the producers consequentially made a much different version of the story; when organized into lists, the difference column is much longer. However, despite the long list of differences, both versions of the story describe a dystopian society very well. The idea in both stories also remains: being equal does not mean being the same, and that is a very important similarity.