In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Delmore Schwartz
- First Published: 1937
- Type of Plot: Dream vision
- Time of Work: 1909
- Setting: Brooklyn
- Principal Characters: The narrator, His father, His mother, The usher, The old lady, The photographer, The fortune-teller
- Genres: Psychological fiction, Short fiction, Bildungsroman
- Subjects: Maturation or coming of age, Dreams, Emotions, Criticism, Generation gap
- Locales: Brooklyn, NY
The Story
The first-person narrator sets a tentative tone at the beginning with his uncertainty: “I think it is the year 1909.” The reader then learns that the narrator is dreaming that he is in a motion-picture theater, viewing a Sunday afternoon in 1909. He sees the man who is to become his father walking the streets of Brooklyn on the way to visit the woman whom he is courting. As the narrator dreams and casts the characters, he can know their thoughts and feelings: his father's awkward impressiveness, for example, his hesitancy about marriage.
The couple—the...
[The entire page is 1090 words long]
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