Collection: In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories

Overview
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories collects Delmore Schwartz's most resonant short fiction into a single volume that foregrounds the struggles of young intellectuals, complex family dynamics, and the religious and cultural contours of Jewish-American life. The title story anchors the collection with a compact but intense meditation on memory, ambition, and the burdens of inherited expectation. Across the volume, Schwartz's narratives move between sharply observed domestic scenes and moments of inward reverie, balancing precise realism with an often lyrical, epigrammatic prose.
Though the stories vary in situation and tone, they cohere through an attention to inner life and to the small social rituals that expose deeper anxieties. Characters are frequently artists, students, or reflective outsiders whose verbal acuity and moral restlessness set them apart from their surroundings. The collection captures a mid‑century urban milieu while aiming at timeless dilemmas about identity, creativity, and responsibility.

Themes and Style
A dominant theme is the tension between aspiration and limitation. Many protagonists are young men who imagine themselves as future makers of literature or thought but who repeatedly encounter the thwarting forces of family obligation, social expectation, or personal insecurity. Jewish identity often appears not as a single subject but as part of a layered cultural landscape that shapes desire, shame, and belonging. Schwartz treats religious tradition and assimilationist pressure with equal subtlety, allowing scenes of everyday life to reveal broader ethical and existential stakes.
Stylistically, the collection is notable for compressed, aphoristic sentences that can feel like prose poems. Schwartz's diction moves easily from conversational idiom to metaphysical insight, and his sentences frequently hinge on sudden, revealing images. Psychological nuance is a hallmark: dialogues and interior monologues disclose character through small hesitations, failed confessions, and the ironic play between what is said and what is meant. The result is fiction that prizes the inner truth of a moment as much as conventional plot.

Central Stories and Emotional Focus
The title piece exemplifies Schwartz's interest in dream, memory, and moral reckonings; it condenses a life's remorse and expectation into a brief, luminous narrative that has long been anthologized. Other tales in the collection perform similar compressions of personal crisis, depicting encounters in parlors, boardinghouses, classrooms, and cafés where ordinary gestures become occasions for self‑revelation. Familial tensions, between fathers and sons, between tradition and modernity, frequently provide the emotional engine for these episodes, while romantic or artistic ambitions supply the stakes.
Rather than relying on dramatic plot turns, the stories often culminate in moments of recognition or failure: a line that cannot be written, a conversation that falters, an act of filial responsibility accepted or refused. These small terminal moments reveal larger questions about what art can demand from life and what life can permit of art.

Legacy and Influence
The collection helped establish Schwartz as a distinctive voice in American letters, admired for his formal precision and moral intensity. Critics and subsequent writers have praised his capacity to fuse poetic sensibility with narrative clarity, and the title story in particular has become emblematic of 20th‑century short fiction about intellectual exile and yearning. The book's acute portrayals of social and psychological constraint influenced later generations of writers who sought to explore the inner lives of artists and the complicated inheritances of immigrant families.
While some readers note a melancholic or elegiac cast to much of Schwartz's work, others find in these stories a curiously vivid moral seriousness and a linguistic economy that continually rewards re‑reading. The collection remains a compact but powerful statement of an author's preoccupations and gifts, offering tightly concentrated fictions that linger in memory.