The Lottery Vs Harrison Bergeron Essay

Shirley Jackson’s, “The Lottery”, and Kurt Vonnegut’s, “Harrison Bergeron”, tragic short stories show a dystopian society where people desire to make it orderly and fair. Each story portrays its own method of achieving this perfect world, but is flawed in many ways. Jackson and Vonnegut both overstress the conflict in their stories to express how absurd it is to assume that any good can come from these methods. Both stories show a society where people are blindly following rules and old traditions, and in the process of creating a perfect society, rebellion starts to appear and ultimately results in death. In “The Lottery”, Jackson presents a village that is completely under the assumption that the old traditions they practice are rational, without even questioning it’s purpose or

To achieve this goal, the characters in this story are brainwashed into thinking that the world they live in is perfect. The people in this new United States of America are not able to live up to their full potentials or think for themselves. This can be shown when the protagonist’s parents say: “‘you been crying’ he said to Hazel. ‘Yup,’ she said. ‘What about?’ he said. ‘I forget,’ she said. ‘Something real sad on television.” Harrison Bergeron’s mother completely forgets the death of her own son because the government had forced her to. The citizens are required to do and believe whatever they are told. This society is completely blindsided by it’s own government and are forced to follow instructions against their own will. Vonnegut’s shows the reader the common misinterpretation of equality. The term equal is twisted around in this tragic story. Equality in this society means that they must suffer the inhumane treatment of being “enforced” to become identical through a style of conditioning which is both punishing and