29 pages • 58 minutes read
Delmore SchwartzIn Dreams Begin Responsibilities
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1938A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Frame
“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” is a narrative with multiple frames. It’s a short story framed as a movie within a dream. In other words, the story’s narrator is asleep and dreaming about an imaginary film that shows the story of his parents’ engagement. Occasionally, the movie is interrupted by technical glitches or the narrator’s emotional outbursts, during which he interacts with other people in the movie theater. Only at the end does he wake to real life, on the morning of his 21st birthday.
These framing devices call into question the “reality” of almost all the story’s events. For example, the text doesn’t reveal whether the dream/movie depicts the parents’ actual experience or just the way the narrator imagines their experience. The significance of the characters in the movie theater and whether they cross into different frames beyond the limitations of this short story is also in question. Within these destabilizing frames, however, the story conveys a clear emotional truth. The narrator is deeply unhappy with his life, especially his family life, and he’s scared to face the bleak reality of adulthood.
Foreshadowing
The story uses extensive foreshadowing. For example, the father’s “awkward” interactions with Rose’s family foreshadow his clumsy marriage proposal to Rose. The grandfather’s concern that the father won’t “make a good husband” proves well-founded (Paragraph 7). The father’s harsh judgments of the characters in the novel Rose is reading foreshadow his harsh judgments of the photographer, fortune-teller, and Rose herself. He judges these characters without context or empathy, and this malicious trait carries over into his marriage and has a hand in its demise.
Some of the foreshadowing is symbolic. When the couple grabs rings on the merry-go-round, readers may intuit that they’ll soon be getting engaged—wearing engagement and wedding rings. Even the number of rings they grab is an omen: The father “acquire[s] ten rings, [the] mother only two, although it was [the] mother who had really wanted them” (Paragraph 14). This detail sets up the revelation that Rose wants marriage more than the father. It’s the father who proposes, but to him, the engagement is just one more goal to chase. He’s greedy to “acquire” it but gets no satisfaction out of it.
Juxtaposition
The story uses juxtaposition in multiple ways. First, it juxtaposes several separate incidents from the parents’ date, framing them as separate scenes in a movie. Together, the scene by the ocean, the scene in the restaurant, and so on offer a detailed portrait of the parents’ troubled relationship. The narrator, like a movie director, jump-cuts from one scene to another and places the responsibility on the reader to follow the underlying emotional thread.
Second, the story juxtaposes the on-screen world with the world of the movie theater, showing the movie’s emotional impact on the narrator. At the end, the story also juxtaposes the narrator’s dream with the narrator’s reality, suggesting that the dream has revealed a truth he can apply to his adult life.
Finally, there are important juxtapositions within the individual movie scenes. For example, the scene in section 3 juxtaposes the “fatal, merciless, passionate ocean” with the ominous “indifference” of the parents (Paragraph 12), marking a symbolic contrast between passion and repression, as well as nature’s menace and humanity’s petty concerns.
Simile
Throughout “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” the narrator uses several vivid similes. These add to the emotional and psychological heft of the story. When the narrator watches his parents’ merry-go-round ride, for example, he “feel[s] like one who looks down on the avenue from the 50th story of a building” (Paragraph 14). In other words, their long ride makes him feel dizzy, nervous, and sick—and not only because of the carousel’s many rotations. He knows their pleasure on the merry-go-round won’t last; their relationship will fall apart.
Colorful similes also help the narrator conjure up the vanished sights, sounds, and technology of 1909. For example, a horse’s hooves “fall like stones in the quiet afternoon” (Paragraph 4), a passing automobile “look[s] like an enormous upholstered sofa” (Paragraph 4), and a photographer’s elaborate camera “looks like a Martian man” (Paragraph 18).
