Tyrannical Control and the Big Other in Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Harrison Bergeron's ideological society has been analyzed from various perspectives, predominantly focusing on its political atmosphere. However, researchers often overlook the role of the government as the Big Other in shaping this society. Drawing on Slavoj Zizek's theory of the big Other, this study aims to analyze the political context of Kurt Vonnegut's dystopian short story, illustrating how authorities shape the lives and personalities of ideological subjects. In this story, everybody is made equal by the big Other, and the laws represented by Handicapper General have handicapped characters such as George and Harrison, due to their above-average intelligence and other attributes deemed dangerous. Therefore, in the first step, this paper explores the role of the big Other, arguing that the Handicapper has taken control of the subjects' minds and actions. Then, it establishes that laws for characters such as George and Hazel are not alienating but disalienating, in line with Zizek's idea regarding the law's role. In the final section of the paper, the focus turns to Harrison's Act against the big Other. Through Zizek's conceptual framework of the Act, the last section scrutinizes Harrison's rebellion as the only means for the subject to break free from the Symbolic order. By Act, he exposes the flaws and contradictions in the oppressive social system. Through the process of conducting this analysis, we can gain valuable insights into understanding the complex relationship between power and ideology in dystopian societies. This research highlights the need to critically examine the mechanisms wielded by governing bodies to assert dominance over ordinary people.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".