Question

Harrison Bergeron: Narrative Response
Write 2–3 well-developed paragraphs on a Google Doc or Word Doc and upload to this form.

PROMPT: Imagine you live in Harrison’s society. Describe one day in your life with your assigned handicaps. Include:

What your handicap is

How it affects your thoughts, emotions, or abilities

Whether you accept the system or secretly question it

Answer 1

Every morning a government attendant straps the metal sash around my waist and clips the small, buzzing earpiece into my ear — my assigned handicap. The sash is heavy enough to make any quick movement awkward; the earpiece emits random, high-pitched noises at irregular intervals so my thoughts break and reform like waves against rocks. A canvas mask hides half my face so others cannot look at me for too long, and small weights hang from my ankles to slow my step. The physical burden dulls my body’s reflexes and makes simple tasks — climbing stairs, carrying groceries, even laughing — feel like work, but the earpiece is the cruelest: it interrupts sentences in my head, leaves my ideas unfinished, and blurs the edges of complex feelings until they are gray and safe. When I sit down to read, the static shifts timing so I cannot follow long arguments or lose myself in a melody; when I try to imagine something new, the noise returns like a guard, and I am left with fragments rather than a whole.

Outwardly I comply: I adjust the weights, apologize for speaking too long, and report promptly to the public exercises. I smile when officials pass because visible dissent is dangerous. Inside, however, I quietly question the fairness of a world that flattens everyone to the same mean. Sometimes I tuck a tiny scrap of printed poetry under my mattress and read it with the earpiece turned off, savoring the way full sentences once felt — and I have learned the precise second the noise will falter so I can think a whole thought before it is cut. Those furtive moments of clarity make the daily humiliations harder to accept; they remind me there is a richness the handicaps are meant to erase. I do not openly rebel, but I do not accept the system in my heart: I collect stolen memories of beauty and keep them alive, a small, private refusal until the day I can risk making it larger.