While John Steinbeck's "The Chrysanthemums" and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s "Harrison Bergeron" are authored with a sense of the same basic theme, one is told with a simpler to empathize mood than the other. Steinbeck's narration of a woman's struggle for equality while being held back, powerless by society, is made more realistic by the high volume of modern imagery and symbology used. While Vonnegut's narration of an entire society's struggle against equality, also being held powerless is less than believable due to the futuristic use of technology personified and modern society's own narrow mind ness that this would never happen in the way it is depicted.
             "The Chrysanthemums" portrays Elisa Allen, a woman frustrated, confused, under appreciated and lonely. She searches and longs for a time of equality when she is on a level playing field with the male species. Steinbeck brilliantly uses his setting as symbols of being confined from a male dominant society "the grey-flannel fog of winter closed off the valley from the sky and the rest of the world." She is able to demonstrate what power she does posses within her own garden, but that is a barrier symbolized by being fenced in. Her frustration is exemplified when she peers down the road and observes her husband and two men conducting business "her work with scissors was over-eager, over powerful." She wants to be apart of business dealings. Although, she is not within that part of society, she is dressed like a man while doing the female work of gardening "... a man's black hat pulled low down over her eyes, clod-hopper shoes, dress completely covered by a big corduroy apron." Upon receiving a compliment from her husband on her gardening abilities, she if only for a brief moment felt a sense of achievement and worth "in her tone and on her face there was a little smugness." When Hen...