The Enormous Radio

“One Sunday afternoon, in the middle of a Schubert quartet, the music faded away altogether. Jim struck the cabinet repeatedly, but there was no response; the Schubert was lost to them forever.”

The loss of the music serves as an inciting incident and as a moment symbolic of deeper losses that may be troubling the Westcott home. The broken radio is the first in a chain of linked events that will provide rising action for the story once the new, extraordinary radio is introduced into the home. The loss is described with a profound gravity that intimates a death or a divorce.

“Irene was proud of her living room, she had chosen its furnishings and colors as carefully as she chose her clothes, and now it seemed to her that her new radio was among her intimate possessions like an aggressive intruder.”

This line moves from vivid characterization to an exceptional example of personification. Irene’s painstaking decorum is contrasted with the displeasing physicality of an unwanted appliance that has come to intrude on her space. This description is also ironic in that the radio allows Irene to become an intruder herself.

“The violent forces that were snared in the ugly gumwood cabinet made her uneasy.”

Those forceful powers are the first in a series of extraordinary capabilities the radio will employ as it tries to pervert Irene’s perspective on the world. With more exposure to the radio, Irene will grow more and more uneasy, until it is clear that the “violent forces” have unmoored her, leaving her disillusioned with all of life.

“Irene’s life was nearly as simple and sheltered as it appeared to be, and the forthright and sometimes brutal language that came from the loudspeaker that morning astonished and troubled her. She continued to listen until the maid came in. Then she turned off the radio quickly, since this insight, she realized, was a furtive one.”

Listening to the radio, Irene is coming to learn truths about the world that were previously unknown to her. Her cloistered existence, with a safe, secure perspective, is falling away as she starts to acquire new knowledge. Irene is engaged in a journey of self-discovery, but she realizes that these insights are dangerous and that they need to remain hidden from others. By layering her own secrets atop those she has learned about her neighbors, Irene is actively engaged with the unprincipled world found all around her.

“The restrained melancholy of the dialogue and the draft from the bedroom window made her shiver, and she went back to bed.”

Irene overhears a solicitous middle-aged couple at night and is chilled by the couple’s raw honesty. The feeling of melancholy is unfamiliar for her and hearing it in the voice of another induces a visceral response in her body.

“Irene had two Martinis at lunch, and she looked searchingly at her friend and wondered what her secrets were.”

The radio’s lessons are altering Irene’s interactions with others. Now, when she’s out with friends, she’s learned to be curious about their interiority. She understands now that all kinds of people keep secrets, and she has become obsessed with this pursuit of hidden truths.

“From the radio in the living room, Jim heard screams, obscenities, and thuds. ‘You know you don’t have to listen to this sort of thing,’ he said. He strode into the living room and turned the switch. ‘It’s indecent,’ he said.”

Rather than intervening in another family’s violent altercation, Jim shuts the radio and chastises his wife for her indecency. This horrid moment exemplifies the contemporary attitudes toward domestic abuse in the 1940s. Jim is more worried about the disruption unfolding in his own home than anything else.

“Please. They’ll hear us.”

Irene fears a reversal of the radio’s powers. She doesn’t wish to become one of those tragic families she’s been hearing over the radio. Ironically, she doesn’t want other people eavesdropping on her life the way she’s been doing. Jim, in his anger, couldn’t care less. He gets so angry that he screams his responses loud enough for the neighbors to hear without the aid of an extraordinary radio. Readers, on the other hand, are aided by the extraordinary power of fiction. In reading the story, readers have accomplished exactly what Irene fears worst, listening in on Jim and Irene’s argument, perhaps even judging them as the story unfolds.