"In Dreams Begin Responsibilities"

With the opening paragraph of "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" by Delmore Schwartz, I thought of a child stumbling upon old black and white family home videos. Much to my surprise, this man was in an audience. The setting is described perfectly. He tells of his jittery nervous father walking to go meet his mother. I could tell the son was old enough because he knew his father so well: "My father has chosen to take this long walk because he likes to walk and think. He thinks about himself in the future and so arrives at the place he is to visit in a mild state of exaltation" (473.4.1-3).

I love how he captures the awkward meeting of a girlfriend/boyfriend of the other's parents.

I learn how important money is to the family when the mother does not want to go to Coney Island because it is "beneath the dignity [of such a] dignified couple" (475.1.5). Also, the previous mention of a close friend, Howard Taft, the current president, recently getting married gave it away as well. In the next paragraph, he expresses his father's insecurities. His father feels as if he will never have enough money to please the mother and goes as far as to "exaggerat[e] an amount which need not have been exaggerated" (475.2.2). After seeing his father's "actualities somehow fall short" (475.2.3), the son begins to cry exposing his insecurities that maybe his father has passed down to him. I see great irony in the reactions that follow his tears. Supposedly, he is watching a movie about his family prior to his birth and begins to cry, while an old lady beside him with no relation to the family begins to get "annoyed and looks at [him] with an angry face"(472.2.5). His reaction compared to that of the audience doesn't match which is so strange.

He did not want his parents to get married and even yelled out in the theatre that nothing good comes from the marriage: "only remorse, hatred, scandel, and two children whose characters are monstrous" (475.1.18). This tells alot of his personality and how he feels about himself, expressing even more the insecurities he has.

Section five is the most telling part of the whole story. After the couple gets engaged, they want to take a picture. The perfectionist photographer will not take a picture if everything does not "vibe" well. The photographer keeps adjusting and re-adjusting the pose of the couple because "he is not satisfied with their appearance. He feels that somehow there is something wrong in their pose" (477.2.13-14). The father runs out of patience and a sub-par picture is taken where the father's smile is a grimace, and the mother's is fake. Even later the mother wants to see a fortune teller and the father cannot stand it. She ultimately leaves the fortune teller stand and chases her soon to be husband out.

The story ends with the ushers removing the man from the theatre, and he wakes up and its his 21st birthday. I believe this is a story of a very troubled boy that did something horribly wrong in his past, and he is blaming his parents for every creating him. He thinks his parents were not destined to be together anyway because his father had to do so much in order to win over his mother. The title still confuses me. Maybe, he is finding himself responsible for his life now that he is twenty-one years old and can't blame it on his parents less than perfect relationship.