Delmore Schwartz's "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities"

In the short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” by Delmore Schwartz, the narrator is a young man dreaming about himself sitting in an old “Moving-picture Theater” around the year 1909.  The boy is watching a movie about the relationship between a man and a woman.  Throughout the movie, the narrator of the story refers to the man in the movie as his father, and the woman as his mother.  The plot follows the couple on a date in Coney Island on June 12^th 1909.  The father proceeds to pick up the narrators mother from her residence in Brooklyn where their journey begins.  They arrive at Coney Island by town car and proceed to take a stroll on the boardwalk where they watch the ocean and enjoy a ride on a carousel, they then continue on with their date with a nice dinner.  It is during dinner that the father proposes to the boy’s mother.  I find this scene very intense.  The father proposes not with a confession of his undying love for the woman, but as though it is just the next step in his overall plan in life.  The man asks for the woman’s hand in marriage as though it is a business deal:

“My father tells my mother that he is going to expand his business, for there is a great deal of money to be made.  He wants to settle down.  After all, he is twenty-nine, he has lived by himself since his thirteenth year, he is making more and more money, and he is envious of his friends where he visits them in the security of their homes, surrounded, it seems, by the calm domestic pleasures, and by delightful children, and then as the waltz reaches the moment when the dancers all swing madly, then, then with awful daring, then he ask my mother to marry him…”

The proposal was lacking of emotion in the way I perceived the passage.  And I believe the narrator felt the same way for he stands up in the midst of the theater and shouts: “Don’t do it!  It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you.  Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.”  The narrator shows his emotion throughout the movie, crying at several points and shouting once more, landing himself thrown out of the movie theater, at which point the narrator wakes up form his dream and the reader learns that the narrator has had this dream on the eve of his 21^st birthday.

I find it noteworthy to mention the scene in which the newly engaged couple has their picture taken.  This is a scene in which the narrator relates to the photographer saying “The photographer charms me, and I approve of him with all my heart, for I know exactly how he feels…”  I believe that this scene, in which the photographer cannot find any pose that suits the couple, shows just how incompatible the couple really is; they seem not to match or complement each other even in appearance.  From this scene the reader gathers that the couple is not a happy, well-paired couple.