In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

The narrator never explains why his parents’ indifference to the ocean (as shown in his movie-within-a-dream) makes him weep. Rather, this moment takes on symbolic meaning, as dreams sometimes do. For the narrator, the “fatal, merciless, passionate ocean” represents the turbulence of passion itself (Paragraph 12), or perhaps the power and danger of nature, which informs all human impulses (including romantic passion) and governs human life and death.

By remaining indifferent to this awesome force, the parents—in their child’s view—ignore the very thing that will make or destroy their relationship. They don’t wade out into the surging tide, as other Coney Island beachgoers do, nor do they marvel at it, as the narrator does from his movie theater seat. Instead, they confine themselves to the boardwalk and dwell on mundane concerns. Yet it’s their passionate natures that doom them in the end, as when the father impulsively proposes marriage—then, on the same date, impulsively storms out on his fiancée.

When the newly engaged couple sits for a photograph, they can’t seem to strike a pose that suits the photographer. (The events of the narrator’s dream are set around 1909, when photography was much more expensive and unwieldy than it is today.