the most handicapped.  His gifts make him a prisoner who must wear heavy weights around his neck and an ugly mask to hide his ugliness.  Instead of allowing such an intelligent person to rise to the top of the society, Bergeron is punished as if he is a criminal, forced to be weighed down so that he is "crippled, hobbled, and sickened."

Lastly, when Harrison Bergeron escapes his handicaps and begins to dance a beautiful dance with a ballerina who has also shed her handicaps, he is mercilessly shot by Diana Moon Glampers.  Instead of their actions being applauded and recognized for their grace and passion, they are killed as if they were criminals committed a horrible crime.  And also ironic, is the fact that Bergeron's parents who are watching their son's murder on television are so heavily handicapped that they have no idea what has happened.  All they know is that something sad happened on tv.

Dramatic irony occurs when the audience knows something that the characters in a piece of literature don't.

Dramatic irony functions in this short story to create a grim humor. We as an audience know immediately that the world of conformity George and Hazel live in is an absurd and insane place. However, they treat this way of living as completely normal. They accept the premise that a "leveling" equality makes the world better.

Humor, in general, emerges out of exaggerated situations: it arises from people getting themselves into or finding themselves in predicaments so over-the-top we can't help but laugh. We laugh at this story (but not its characters) because of the gap between how George and Hazel innocently and gently live in an environment that abuses them continually (even to the point of murdering their talented son in front of them on television) and the utterly absurd waste of human potential and happiness that having to live in that society causes.

The central role of dramatic irony in this excellent short story functions in the way that George and Hazel are not aware of what they are watching on TV but the audience is. The irony in this becomes particularly poignant when George returns to the television, having missed watching his son being brutally executed, to find his wife crying. However, her "average" intelligence means that she is unable to remember why she is actually crying:

"I forget," she said. "Something real sad on television... It's all kind of mixed up in my mind," said Hazel.

We of course know precisely what it is that has made Hazel so upset, but Hazel and George, because of the world in which they live, are doomed to never know and to stay like that for the rest of their lives. The tragedy of their son and the way that his brilliant life was extinguished will never be known by them, and they will be left to follow their average lives until they die.