Short Story: In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

Summary
"In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" opens with a moment of public recognition that slides immediately into private memory. The narrator, struck by an image of his father, is swept into a reverie that collapses time: the contemporary city and the immigrant household of his youth cohabit in a single, uncanny present. What follows is less a straightforward narrative than a condensed, dream-logic account of return and reckoning, in which the speaker wanders through rooms of family history, overhears conversations that echo long after they end, and confronts the complex textures of filial love, disappointment and obligation.
The action moves fluidly between realistic detail and surreal episodes. Domestic scenes , a kitchen, a child's bedroom, the modest urban apartment of immigrant parents , are punctured by allegorical moments: the narrator becomes a kind of defendant in a moral inquest, watched by relatives and neighbors whose judgments feel both intimate and archetypal. Throughout, the narrator is aware of being both observer and actor, a young man whose nascent literary ambitions are measured against the hard material needs and resentments of an older generation.

Themes and Style
Schwartz blends autobiographical candor with high lyricism, producing prose that reads as much like compressed poetry as like traditional storytelling. Memory is not rendered as a faithful record but as a charged, selective reconstruction, capable of both tenderness and accusation. The story repeatedly returns to the interplay of art and duty: creative longing feels at once liberating and culpable, a source of individual promise that risks betraying family expectations and communal survival. Guilt becomes the engine of the narrative, a feeling that complicates any triumph of talent.
Jewish-American identity and immigrant experience are present as background and motive rather than as documentary detail. The parents' past, their unfulfilled sacrifices and small humiliations, haunt the narrator's sense of self. Language often shifts from conversational realism to evocative, almost theatrical tableaux; dream sequences amplify the psychological stakes, turning everyday domestic objects into symbols of inheritance and constraint. The tension between public success and private responsibility is not resolved didactically; instead the story leaves the reader with an uneasy recognition of how talent can be experienced as both blessing and burden.

Legacy and Interpretation
The piece has been widely anthologized as Schwartz's signature short work and is frequently cited for its intimacy and formal daring. It captures a particular moment in American letters: a young writer negotiating the paradoxes of modern identity while speaking out of a small, immigrant community. Critics and readers alike have praised the story's brevity and intensity, noting how a few concentrated pages can open onto a lifetime of familial and ethical complexity.
Read today, the story retains its power to unsettle. Its compact structure and moral restlessness continue to invite multiple readings: as a meditation on artistic responsibility, as an indictment of generational misunderstanding, and as a portrait of the ways memory and imagination shape personal destiny. The narrative's dreamlike center refuses neat resolution, insisting instead that beginnings of desire always carry with them obligations that are moral, social and inexorably intimate.