You've got to remember that the role of an artist isn't always to provide answers. The role of an artist is to provide questions. 'Harrison Bergeron' is a nigh

You've got to remember that the role of an artist isn't always to provide answers. The role of an artist is to provide questions. 'Harrison Bergeron' is a nightmare tale, not a Utopia… but Harrison is not sympathetic, he is a tyrant, 'justifying' the world as established. If the story is a fairytale for the right-leaning, it's for the very childish right-leaning. It's also too aggressive to be a fairytale for would-be left-leaning moralists. It's an exaggerated picture of a condition: forced equality of outcome made hideous, a presentation like Swift's 'A Modest Proposal'. As a reader, your job is to get the picture, not to take it literally or apply it. If it were truly a parable for the right, Harrison might've broke into his parents' house and liberated them, or rescued a chosen ballerina (with or without his eventual fate) as if he'd loved her, but no: everything in the story is just a nightmare and awful. Harrison is a parody of an ubermensch and is destroyed, and there's no escape from the proposition, nor anybody to understand the horror of it: that's left to the reader. As both a better-than and lesser-than in different sorts of ways, I'm more than happy to discuss the story without concern of what it might say about me. I think it's a very good story and an intentionally terrible philosophy. No way was Vonnegut attempting to indoctrinate anybody with this wild vision. At best it's a cautionary tale, but if you're taking it too literally there's a caution for you in there as well: note that Harrison is a monster wanting only power and sex, bullying those around him in between Hulking out. That is no argument for giving him the world that he wants handed to him.