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.
Themes
Dreams and Disappointment
As the title suggests, dreams are central to the meaning of “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” The story incorporates multiple kinds of dreams: literal sleep-induced dreams, the dream-world of the silver screen, ambitions and aspirations, and even the American Dream itself. In the process, it dramatizes how all these types of dreams can end in disappointment, or sour into nightmares. At the same time, it suggests that dreams (both literal and figurative) are deeply meaningful, teaching lessons one may otherwise ignore.
The narrator’s literal dream ends on a note of fear and shame, as he yells frantically and gets kicked out of a movie theater before waking up on his 21st birthday. The movie portrays a painful episode in his family history: his parents’ engagement at Coney Island, which deteriorated into a quarrel, much as their marriage later deteriorated into “hatred.” In other words, the movie shows their dream of a happy marriage collapsing almost instantly. Entangled in that dream are their ambitions for success and prosperity—their slice of the American Dream. The narrator doesn’t reveal how his parents fared financially, but socially, their marriage embroiled them in “scandal.” They didn’t achieve their highest hopes, and the weight of this is present in the story. The father, ambitious and longing to become as “big” and important as the President, settled into a married life that resulted in dissatisfaction. His pursuit of happiness failed, and he thus affected his entire family in turn.
Having just turned 21, the son awakes to a “bleak winter morning” (Paragraph 19) that may reflect the bleakness of the Great Depression (during which Schwartz himself turned 21 and wrote the story). It’s as though disappointment and depression are family legacies he’s inherited, ever present in his dreams, his past, his present, and his future.
If the story shows how dreams can turn nightmarish, it also illustrates the power and significance of dreams. The parents’ aspirations, mismatched though they are, drive them to marry and have children. Their dreams transform their lives—and create new life. The narrator’s dream (in particular, the dreamlike world on the movie screen) repeatedly overwhelms him with emotion. Though it’s a sleep-induced hallucination, it feels painfully real. It also leaves him with a lesson he won’t soon forget, as the dream-usher scolds him, “Don’t you know that you can’t do whatever you want to do? [ …] everything you do matters too much” (Paragraph 19). Through the usher’s words, the story suggests that every facet of dreams and waking life matters a great deal. Dreams motivate one to action; actions have consequences that reverberate down the generations, and may even haunt one’s dreams, or one’s children’s dreams.
Destiny and Agency
The story explores the themes of destiny and agency, or fate and free will, through the eyes of a protagonist who seems to have very little agency at all. The narrator is stuck in a passive dream state, and even within his dream, he’s hardly doing anything. Instead, he’s sitting back and watching a movie about his parents’ lives. They are the ones taking action and making choices; he’s doomed to watch helplessly as their choices yield painful consequences, just as they did in real life. He can (and does) burst into tears or leave the screening for a moment, but he can’t seem to leave the theater altogether—at least until the usher kicks him out and the dream ends. However, he wakes to a reality that reflects his horrific dream.
The story implies, however, that the narrator does have some agency in the real world, where he has just turned 21, reaching full-fledged adulthood. Just before the dream ends, the usher warns him, “You will be sorry if you do not do what you should do, you can’t carry on like this, it is not right” (Paragraph 19). Though the usher doesn’t explain further, he makes clear that there’s a “right” course of action, and that the narrator should take it to avoid regret. Since the narrator has just been panicking in the dream over his parents’ chaotic relationship, the usher implies that he must learn to control himself, break free of his parents’ bitter legacy, and chart his own path.
The parents themselves, as depicted in the dream, illustrate both the cruelty of fate and the danger of bad choices. On the one hand, they are characters in a “motion picture,” with no more control over their actions than any other movie characters (Paragraph 1). Their movie must run its course; they must get engaged, have a fight, and so on. In this way, the “motion picture” symbolizes the inexorable “motion” of fate, which carries our lives along in one direction only. On the other hand, within the world of the film, the parents do make significant choices, sometimes carelessly and sometimes not. For example, the father’s decision to get engaged is impulsive: He is “puzzled, even in his excitement, at how he had arrived at the proposal” (Paragraph 17). For the mother, the decision is deliberate, even calculated: She accepts the proposal by exclaiming, “It’s all I’ve wanted from the moment I saw you” (Paragraph 17). Planned or unplanned, however, their choice is a choice—they make it together, and it does irrevocable damage to their lives.
Their evening ends with a quarrel in the fortune-teller’s booth, a place that purports to tell them their destiny. The father declares the booth “nonsense” and runs out, so the couple never gets their fortune told. Superficially, then, the father takes decisive action, as if rejecting the whole notion of “fortune.” Yet his action again seems impulsive—he’s not fully in control of himself—and in a way, it does predict the future. The couple’s whole relationship will be marred by this kind of quarreling and hostility. Ultimately, then, the story leaves the question of fate versus free will undecided, even as it strongly suggests that we bear some responsibility for our actions.
Maturity and Responsibility
From the title onward, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” takes up the themes of maturity and responsibility and links them with the subconscious world of dreams. The story portrays all three of its main characters as young and immature, even though they belong to different generations. The narrator is a 21-year-old man, and in his dream, his parents are roughly the same age. The only mature characters in the story are minor ones: the narrator’s grandfather, the fortune-teller, the old lady in the movie theater, and the usher. These older characters seem to possess a wisdom the younger characters lack. Because they’re all part of the narrator’s dream, however, they represent the narrator’s internal voice of maturity—his better judgment, speaking to him through his subconscious mind.
For most of the story, both the parents and the narrator serve as case studies in immaturity. They epitomize the rashness, folly, and unrestrained passion of young adulthood. The father is an impatient man who quarrels easily, proposes marriage on the spur of the moment, and impulsively storms out on his bride-to-be. The mother is much more deliberate in her decision to marry, but she has deceived herself about the quality of the match. She’s been so intent on marrying the father that she’s overlooked red flags (his boastful arrogance, macho condescension, and so on). She’s as quick to tears as he is to anger (she starts sobbing as soon as he proposes), and she shares this quality with her son, the narrator. For his part, the narrator repeatedly dissolves into tears while watching his parents’ mistakes. Even in the context of the dream, his desire to change the past—that is, dissuade his parents from marrying—is quixotic, sentimental, and absurd.
It is the elders in the dream who embody reason, wisdom, and restraint, and who point the way toward adult responsibility. In the dream-movie, for example, both the narrator’s grandfather and the fortune-teller are more astute and coolheaded than the young couple. The grandfather sagely “rub[s] his bearded cheek” and presciently fears that the father “will not make a good husband” for Rose (Paragraph 7). The fortune-teller restrains Rose from chasing after the father; symbolically, destiny itself is telling her not to go through with the marriage. Meanwhile, the elders in the movie theater (the old lady and the usher) urge the youthful narrator to control his emotions. The usher insists that “a young man like you, with your whole life before you,” can’t “get hysterical like this” (Paragraph 19). His reprimand serves as a kind of assignment for the narrator’s adult life: “[D]o what you should do,” learn wisdom beyond your years, and don’t repeat your parents’ mistakes (Paragraph 19). The narrator is left to figure out what this means in practice; dreams may be where responsibility begins, but they are not where it ends.
