"In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" is a short story by American poet and short story writer

Delmore Schwartz Delmore Schwartz (December 8, 1913 – July 11, 1966) was an American poet and short story writer. Early life Schwartz was born in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, where he also grew up. His parents, Harry and Rose, both Romanian Jews, separated when ...

. "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" is widely regarded as one of Schwartz's finest stories and is frequently anthologized. Of all of Schwartz's stories, it is probably his best-known and most influential.

Background and publishing history

Schwartz's biographer, James Atlas, wrote a thorough account of the story's genesis:

Schwartz wrote "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" over a July weekend in 1935, when he was only twenty-one. A day later, his friend William Barrett appeared at the boarding house off Washington Square where Schwartz was living that summer and found the author ecstatic; he knew he had written a masterpiece, a verdict later confirmed by
Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov ( ; 2 July 1977), also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin (), was a Russian and American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Born in Imperial Russia in 1899, Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Rus ...
, who singled he storyout as one of his "half a dozen favorites" in contemporary American literature.

The story was first published in 1937 in the first issue of ''

Partisan Review ''Partisan Review'' (''PR'') was a left-wing small-circulation quarterly "little magazine" dealing with literature, politics, and cultural commentary published in New York City. The magazine was launched in 1934 by the Communist Party USA–affi ...

''. A year later it was published in Schwartz's first book of poems and stories which was also entitled ''In Dreams Begin Responsibilities''. The title came from the Irish poet

W. B. Yeats William Butler Yeats (, 13 June 186528 January 1939), popularly known as W. B. Yeats, was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer, and literary critic who was one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the ...

' 1914 volume of poems '' Responsibilities'', which has an epigraph "In dreams begins responsibility," attributed to an "Old play." The story has been available in print since the author's death in two posthumously published collections of Schwartz's work, ''In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories'' (1978) and ''Screeno: Stories and Poems'' (2004). In a 2003 review of ''In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories'' that appeared in ''

The Observer ''The Observer'' is a British newspaper published on Sundays. First published in 1791, it is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper. In 1993 it was acquired by Guardian Media Group Limited, and operated as a sister paper to ''The Guardian'' ...

'', Jason Cowley wrote, " chwartznever wrote a finer story than 'Dreams'."

Plot summary

The story tells of an unnamed young man who has a

dream A dream is a succession of images, ideas, emotions, and sensation (psychology), sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. Humans spend about two hours dreaming per night, and each dream lasts around ...

that he is in an old-fashioned movie theater in 1909. As he sits down to watch the film, he starts to realize that it is a

motion picture A film, also known as a movie or motion picture, is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, emotions, or atmosphere through the use of moving images that are generally, since ...

documenting his parents'

courtship Courtship is the period wherein some couples get to know each other prior to a possible marriage or committed romantic, ''de facto'' relationship. Courtship traditionally may begin after a betrothal and may conclude with the celebration of marri ...

. The black-and-white silent film is of very poor quality, and the

camera A camera is an instrument used to capture and store images and videos, either digitally via an electronic image sensor, or chemically via a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. As a pivotal technology in the fields of photograp ...

is shaky, but nonetheless, he is engrossed. Soon the young man starts to get upset. He yells things at the screen, trying to influence the outcome of his parents' courtship and the other people in the audience begin to think he is crazy. Several times the character breaks down. In the end he shouts at his parents when it appears they are going to break up, and he is dragged out of the theater by an usher who reprimands him. In the end, the character wakes up from his dream and notes that it is the snowy morning of his twenty-first birthday.

References

{{Reflist 1937 short stories American short stories Works originally published in Partisan Review Jewish American literature