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John Cheever's The Enormous Radio

763 Words4 Pages

Evan Meyer Professor Cara Snider English 102:21 March 5, 2018 When put together, insight about John Cheever's childhood, paired with the characterization in this story manufactures and reinforces the stories most evident theme: appearances can be deceiving. To start off, the reader is given a bleak description of an average couple living in Manhattan in the 1940's, with the only thing separating them from their peers is their taste in "serious music." When their radio finally breaks, the husband buys a new one. The radio, bought for their pleasure, did not work correctly. Instead of playing music as it should, Jim and Irene Westcott find that they are tuned into the lives of their neighbors. Irene finds she can’t stop listening to it. …show more content…

Cheever shines light on that trait in the opening of The Enormous Radio with a master class in characterization: "Jim and Irene Westcott were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletin boards. They were parents of two young children, they had been married nine years, they lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment house near Sutton Place, they went to the theatre an average of 10.3 times a year, and they hoped someday to live in Westchester."(Cheever, 1). The whole of the story is encompassed in those two sentences. There is also an expressionless element to this description, a severing disconnection, that not for the final time questions the figure narrating …show more content…

That he was expelled from Thayer Academy in Massachusetts as seventeen. You might even find that, "With the eventual failure of the shoe industry and the difficulties of his parents’ marriage, he had an unhappy adolescence." (Britannica, 2). Because of the downfall of his father's business, "His mother owned a gift shop and supported the family with the shop's profits." (notable biographies, 1). This strained his parent's marriage. However, Cheever's family always appeared respectable, and middle-class. Never wanting to truly show that they were not what they appeared to

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