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JOHN CHEEVER - THE ENORMOUS RADIO

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JOHN CHEEVER – THE ENORMOUS RADIO

The story presents a typical American couple from the middle class. They differ from other because they like listening to ‘serious music’ on radio. Once the radio’s broken, Jim buys a new one. Irene realizes that it can transmit what happens in their neighbor’s apartments and she gets used to eavesdropping.

The atmosphere is complicated. It’s humorous at the beginning with all these funny things happening to Irene with the new radio. Then it becomes mysterious and suspenseful — the action is developing, strange things happen, plus all the epithets, such as ‘scratchy’, make the story sound like a creepy camp story. Later, as Irene gets to know more and more about the neighbors, it becomes more dramatic and reaches the climax when Jim says that Irene is not better than all of them. Cheever uses a lot of repetitions and polysyndeton to make the things the neighbors say more emphatic and touching Irene’s and our feelings.

There’s also irony, manifested by zeugma (‘demonstrations of indigestion, carnal love, abysmal vanity …’), hyperbole (‘the speed greater than light’), mention of statistical reports, and also at the end of the story, when it turns out that though Jim agrees they are not hypocritical and don’t care about money, they are hypocritical and they do care about money.

The central figure of this story is the radio. It is a symbol of God, and Irene treats it as one at the end (the word is emphasized with a capital letter, which shows here fear and awe. At first he is good and kind to her and transmits a voice of a woman telling someone a fairy-tale. But at the end, when she loses her modesty by eavesdropping her neighbors and feeling superior to them, he becomes angry and shows Irene her real nature, bringing disharmony into her life just as the ugly radio brings disharmony into her well-designed room with good furniture. Because the radio is also a mirror.

It is important how different Jim and Irene react to what happens with their neighbors. She thinks about these people as if they are her relatives; she sympathizes with some of them and wants to help them (even if it is because she does not want to think that her family is the same). But Jim doesn’t. He doesn’t listen to the radio, and they are complete strangers for him, like these victims killed in a railroad accident in Tokyo, about whom the radio reports at the end of the story along with the weather forecast.

As far as Jim and Irene’s relationships are concerned, they seem to be relatively happy at the beginning, but further reading reveal their detachment from one another, mostly Irene’s detachment from Jim and their children. She barely cares about her children, who are looked after by a baby-sitter, or about her husband, who has a kind of middle-age crisis right now. She only cares what people think about her, if they would judge her, because she judges them.

This story tells us that we should not be judging other people, because sometimes we are no better than them or even worse. It proves the Biblical saying that one sees a speck in another’s eyes, but cannot see the log in his or her own.

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