"The Enormous Radio" By John Cheever, Analysis
Submitted by Getbusy on 06/30/2008 05:21 PM
- Category: American History
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"The Enormous Radio" By John Cheever, Analysis
John Cheever
The Enormous Radio - Analysis
Most of John Cheever's stories deal with the problems of common people's lives. He describes the manners and morals of the middle class, the life in suburban America. Although "The Enormous Radio" is not really about the suburbs since the characters live in New York, there seems to be nothing unusual or extraordinary about them. It's a story about common people.
In the introduction the author describes the main characters, Jim and Irene Westcott, as an educated but quite commonplace family with an average income and no serious financial problems, as seen from the fact that they hope to move to a more prestigious area, and live on the 12th floor of their apartment house, which is not really prestigious, but not really bad either. Cheever describes them in a way as if he's giving statistics: 12th floor, two children, nine years of marriage, 10.3 visits to the theatre a year, etc. just as if he was giving a profile of an average family. As we see from further description, Irene is not much of a smart lady; she has good education, but not much knowledge and wants to seem more than she is and have more than she can afford: she wears a fitch coat dyed to resemble mink. This detail brings about a question: why, having graduated from a prestigious college can't she afford a real mink coat? Jim dresses the way he used to do at college and his manner is intentionally naïve quite a strange behavior for a man with graying hair. The strangest thing is that this is not pretence, not the strive to look younger, but Jim is absolutely sincere about this, it's just how he feels. From the very beginning of the story, if we pay attention to the tiny details and the little hints the author is giving, we can start suspecting that the Westcotts aren't really a usual family, that there's something wrong about them. However, the author says they are just like anybody else but for their interest in classical...
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