Answer and Explanation:
"Harrison Bergeron" is a short story by author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. It is set in the year of 2081, when the American government has gone to great lengths to provide social equality. People who have advantages such as beauty, strength and intelligence are forced to wear handicaps. Harrison Bergeron is a tall, strong, handsome, and intelligent 14-year-old boy who, for those reasons, is forced to wear all sorts of handicaps to make him average. Harrison, however, decides to go against the status quo. He removes the handicaps, convinces a ballerina to do the same, and they both dance, elegantly soaring, while it is all being broadcast on television. The mood at this point is of lightness, relief, happiness:
And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!
Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.
They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.
They leaped like deer on the moon.
The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it.
It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling. They kissed it.
However, the Handicapper General shoots and kills Harrison. This is the anti-climax of the story, the moment when readers are disappointed, having their hopes frustrated. The mood is now the opposite of what it had just been. Readers feel hopelessness and despair. Even Harrison's mother, who cannot understand what she has just watched due to her reduced intelligence, is sad about it:
You been crying" he said to Hazel.
"Yup," she said.
"What about?" he said.
"I forget," she said. "Something real sad on television."