In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” borrows its title from the poet-playwright W. B. Yeats, who used a version of the quotation (“In dreams begins responsibility”) as the epigraph to a play—and credited it to a different, unnamed play. The title has an aphoristic quality, and it serves as a thesis statement for the story. Although the narrator’s experience is a study of Dreams and Disappointment, the story suggests that life’s disappointments and failed dreams can build character, pointing the way toward Maturity and Responsibility. This progress is not inevitable, however, and depends on the dreamer’s willingness to accept responsibilities and cope with existing circumstances.

The story’s conflict takes place entirely inside the narrator’s head (his dream world), but the narrator implies that the dream is grounded in his real-life circumstances, including the turmoil of his parents’ relationship. In the dream, there is a movie in which the narrator’s father courts the narrator’s mother, Rose, several years before the narrator’s birth. As the father walks toward Rose’s home to take her on a date, he weighs whether to propose marriage, establishing the main tension in the story. Part of him feels “panicky” about marriage; part of him feels it would be “nice” and would boost his career (Paragraph 5). Once he proposes to Rose, the tension escalates rather than dissipates. Rose turns out to be far more eager to marry than he is, and her romantic passion only heightens his unspoken panic.

In the story, the narrator adamantly believes that the marriage shouldn’t have happened, based on both his parents’ on-screen behaviors and his personal experiences. It is thus stressful for him to witness the origin of a lifetime of poor decisions and negative emotions. Notably, he wants them to not proceed with their relationship, even if it means he wouldn’t exist. His devasted state while watching the movie and his willingness to sacrifice his existence allude to some of the narrator’s real-life challenges outside the story. Despite the limited amount of information revealed about the narrator’s personal life, the story suggests a complex, tragic life that permeates the story between the lines of the narrative.

In his frustration, the agitated narrator shouts at the movie screen, “Don’t do it” (Paragraph 17). That is, he begs his parents not to go through with the marriage. This seemingly futile gesture raises the problem of Destiny and Agency, another core theme in the story. The narrator understands that the story on the screen took place in the past, before his birth (although it is still possible that his dream-like rendition is not the whole truth). Despite his understanding of this timeline, the narrator behaves as if his parents can still break their engagement, even though the time for that choice has long since passed. He can’t stop the marriage from happening any more than he can stop the movie from playing. The narrator screams to “communicate [his] terrible fear” of his parents’ foolishness (Paragraph 19). All sense that this quarrel heralds some larger disaster they are powerless to stop—namely, the disaster of their life together as a family. However, when the usher ejects the narrator from the theater, he hints that the narrator might have some agency after all. He’s still “a young man […] with [his] whole life before [him],” so however unhappy his childhood and adolescence have been, he might not be doomed to a lifetime of unhappiness (Paragraph 19). To avoid that fate, he will have to control himself and start “do[ing] what [he] should do”—that is, take responsibility for his actions (Paragraph 19).

The theme of Destiny and Agency is built not only within the narrator’s frame but also within the frame of the dream-movie. The newly engaged couple have their picture taken by a photographer, but they can’t manage to strike a flattering pose. The father loses his patience with the photographer, and the picture turns out badly, revealing the emotional tension the couple has been trying to hide. Then the couple quarrels over whether or not to have their fortune told. On the symbolic level, these incidents reflect the couple’s growing discomfort with the present and the future. Even though this should be one of the happiest days of their lives, they can’t enjoy the present moment enough to take a decent photograph. Worse, the father is so panicked about their future that he won’t participate in a lighthearted palm reading. The father’s intense reaction to the fortune-teller’s booth shocks the mother and seems out of all proportion to events: “But suddenly my father feels that the whole thing is intolerable; he tugs at my mother’s arm, but my mother refuses to budge. And then, in terrible anger, my father lets go of my mother’s arm and strides out, leaving my mother stunned” (Paragraph 19). His anger thinly covers his fear of what the whole enterprise of fortune-telling implies: His destiny is already decided and whatever agency he might have had was irrevocably lost the moment he made his proposal of marriage.

This last incident in the movie builds to the story’s dramatic climax. The father angrily flees the fortune-teller’s booth; the mother tries to chase after him, but the fortune-teller “begs her not to do so” (Paragraph 19). On the literal level, the fortune-teller may be giving the father time to cool down. Symbolically, she seems to represent destiny itself, urging the mother to let him go for the sake of her happiness.

This dream occurs just before the narrator wakes to his 21st birthday, suggesting that time moves forward against one’s will, even when poor decisions and hurtful history trap one in place emotionally. The significance of his horrific dream experience in anticipation of his birthday is left open to interpretation, though it is implied to be born of the narrator’s inner anxiety and anguish. In a brief denouement, the narrator wakes up and is left to face the unpleasant responsibilities of adulthood and apply the usher’s lesson in whatever way he can. The future looks “bleak,” but he has plenty of life still to live and at least some chance of avoiding his parents’ worst mistakes. Developing Maturity and Responsibility lingers in the story as a daunting solution that feels out of reach, though the narrator’s anxiety is linked to the anticipation of aging into an adult.

Because it’s rooted in Schwartz’s actual family history, the story’s technique anticipates what would later be called autofiction: lightly fictionalized autobiography. The dream scenario is imaginary, but the narrator is essentially Delmore Schwartz and the setting reflects the Brooklyn milieu he grew up in. Because the narrator’s waking life takes place in the 1930s (just over 21 years after 1909), the same decade during which Schwartz wrote “In Dreams,” the story also reflects the cultural atmosphere of the Great Depression. This was a period of intense economic and political volatility, both in America and around the world. It is no surprise that the narrative traces an arc from the father’s optimism (portrayed as a can-do American spirit) to the son’s emotional breakdown (which verges on despair). Another well-known Schwartz story, “The World Is a Wedding,” deals more explicitly with the pervasive disappointments of this period: “After five years of the [great] depression, the hopes of most of the boys of the circle had faded slowly like a color or were worn thin like a cloth” (Schwartz, Delmore. The World Is a Wedding. New Directions, 1948, p. 11).