Dreams Begin Responsibility, Delmore Schwartz focuses on themes of maturity, responsibility and family. He does this through the interaction of several characters: the son, father, and the merry-go-round. Each of these characters is more than part of the story, though, each is symbolic within its interaction with one another, and the archetype it forms with society and culture.
The Son is the central character of the idea of maturation -- of aging, of maturing, and of the manner in which these events change a person's psychological understanding and reaction to the world. When one is young, nature is vast an strange, as one ages, this changes. "But I stare at the terrible sun, which breaks up sight, and the fatal merciless passionate ocean (513)." Time and emotion remain strangers, but the archetype of the Son means hat one is new to the world and must try to understand the complexity of inter-relationships. ". . . I watch again with thirsty interest, like a child who tries to maintain hi sulk when he is offered the bribe of candy" (515). And most certainly, the aging Son views communication in a black-and-white...
"I feel as if I were walking tight-rope one hundred feet over a circus audience and suddenly the rope is showing signs of breaking…"(516). This aging is like birth -- sights, smells, and sounds morph into new meanings, many of which remain confusing like a whirlwind of fear.
As an archetype, the Father-figure is typically wise, the one who teaches, the one who instructs, and the one for the Son to emulate. The Father-figure often appears to be in another world, one of important thoughts ad considerations that are too deep for just anyone. "My father has chosen to take this long walk because he likes to walk and think. He thinks about himself in the future and so arrives at the place he is to visit in a mild state of exaltation" (511). Like the anti-hero of the Greek myths, the Father is not always assured. "They [my father and mother] are not yet engaged and he is not sure that he loves my mother, so that, once in a while, when he becomes panicky about the bond already…
