Essay Questions

Keeping within the confines of dream logic, does the narrator himself appear in the movie he is watching?

Although the movie in the dream seems to follow a conscious logic, it is important to keep in mind that putting the word “dreams” in the title is a conscious act on the part of the author, so it is certainly acceptable to interpret the story from the perspective of dream logic. From this point of view, the narrator might appear not as himself, but in symbolic form and there is much to suggest that the photographer is this symbolic manifestation. Like the narrator advice at the screen to his parents, the photographer also makes an effort to get correct his feeling that “somehow there is something wrong with their pose.”

In what way can the basic philosophical view of life expressed in the story be described as Nietzschean?

In addition to his more famous concerts of the Uberman and the will to power, one of the theories which defines Friedrich Nietzsche is his concept of eternal recurrence which postulates that given an infinite amount of time and a finite number of actions, a person’s life will unfold in exactly the same way. The story consistently and persistently illustrates this idea through a recurrence of circular imagery in which events repeat unchanged. The movie itself, for instance, repeats the courtship of the narrator’s parents with no way to tailor or edit it in order to make it turn out happier. The opening lines of the first two sentences both inform the reader that the year is 1909. The couple walk down the same streets yet again. The photographer keeps trying to find a suitable pose over and over only to be disappointed with each one. And, of course, the central symbol of this philosophical view of an ever-persisting, never-changing circular pattern of repetition: the merry-go-round.

What is most significant about the incident with the fortune teller?

The mother wants to hear what the future holds for her. The father does not. Ultimately, the squabble over whether to hear or not is academic; neither of them ever do get to hear what the fortune teller has to say. This is significant because the narrator has been denied the opportunity to be privy to what might have been an alternative future for his mother—and, by association, his father. Along with the fact that the movie presents an image of the past which even someone armed with knowledge of the future—in a dream—lacks the ability to change, this resigned acceptance that fate will be what fate will cements the idea that the story the portrait of a fatalist as a young man.