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.
Symbols & Motifs
The Ocean
The narrator never explains why his parents’ indifference to the ocean (as shown in his movie-within-a-dream) makes him weep. Rather, this moment takes on symbolic meaning, as dreams sometimes do. For the narrator, the “fatal, merciless, passionate ocean” represents the turbulence of passion itself (Paragraph 12), or perhaps the power and danger of nature, which informs all human impulses (including romantic passion) and governs human life and death.
By remaining indifferent to this awesome force, the parents—in their child’s view—ignore the very thing that will make or destroy their relationship. They don’t wade out into the surging tide, as other Coney Island beachgoers do, nor do they marvel at it, as the narrator does from his movie theater seat. Instead, they confine themselves to the boardwalk and dwell on mundane concerns. Yet it’s their passionate natures that doom them in the end, as when the father impulsively proposes marriage—then, on the same date, impulsively storms out on his fiancée.
The Photographer’s Booth
When the newly engaged couple sits for a photograph, they can’t seem to strike a pose that suits the photographer. (The events of the narrator’s dream are set around 1909, when photography was much more expensive and unwieldy than it is today. Rather than take many snapshots at once, the photographer hopes to take and develop one good photo.) This moment serves as a symbolic snapshot of the couple’s relationship—an ominous portrait of how they really feel about each other, and marriage. Their experience in the photographer’s booth also reflects their attitude toward the present, whereas their experience in the fortune-teller’s booth reflects their attitude toward the future.
Symbolically, the couple’s failure to strike a balanced, pleasing pose suggests that they’re fundamentally mismatched. Their photo doesn’t quite work because they don’t quite work. The father’s impatience with the photographer reflects his impatience with marriage itself and his dawning fear that he has made a mistake in proposing. When the photo is finally taken, it depicts “my father’s smile turned into a grimace and my mother’s bright and false” (Paragraph 18). Their expressions betray the resentment brewing beneath the artificial surface of their romance.
The Fortune-Teller’s Booth
The fortune-teller’s booth is a symbol of the future itself: specifically, the couple’s future together. The mere presence of the booth seems to draw out their respective feelings about the future. The mother, Rose, wants to have their fortunes told; the father does not. In other words, she remains optimistic and excited about their shared future, while he no longer does. He dreads what their future holds, so he refuses to have his palm read even for fun, instead declaring that “this is all nonsense” (Paragraph 19). He deems the booth “intolerable” and walks out, leaving Rose stunned. Symbolically, he rejects their future together—or tries to.
After he storms off, Rose tries to go after him, but the fortune-teller restrains her. In this way, the fortune-teller’s booth ends up symbolically dividing the couple. Rose remains committed to a future with her new fiancé even as he tries to abandon the whole relationship. The story suggests that Rose prevails in the short term (the pair do end up marrying), but that the long-term future is indeed grim (the marriage falls apart). Ironically, the couple’s foray into the fortune-teller’s booth does offer a sign of what’s to come—just not in the way Rose hoped.
The Merry-Go-Round/Rings
The narrator’s parents ride a merry-go-round, on which they try to grab “nickel rings which are attached to the arm of one of the posts”—a feature of some old-fashioned carousels (Paragraph 13). The father grabs more rings than the mother, but it’s the mother who actually wants them. Symbolically, their ring acquisition represents what they’re about to attain on this date: an engagement. That is, it foreshadows the father’s spontaneous, ring-free marriage proposal, which occurs later in the evening. The mother accepts his proposal with far more emotion than he puts into it, implying that she wants the marriage more than he does.
The merry-go-round might also be symbolic in another way. As the couple rides, they seem to make “an eternal circuit” (Paragraph 13). This might represent the endless cycle of ambition, which keeps people reaching toward goal after goal, or the endless cycle of life, which causes human tragedies to repeat generation after generation. Watching the merry-go-round makes the narrator dizzy, as if this endless cycle sickens him.
