Short Story #1

The Enormous Radio by: Deylah McCarty

If you could secretly intrude upon the private lives of others, would you abuse that power? In John Cheever’s The Enormous Radio, this is exactly what happens in the Westcott household. The Westcotts are a rich family living in an apartment in Sutton Place, which is a very fancy and elegant part of New York. They are reasonably smart, but as with some rich people, a bit naïve to common things. One such thing: the radio.

The Westcotts own a reasonably small, simple radio, one with a few problems, which were presumably solved by Mr. Westcott striking the thing with his hand. One day, however, the radio stops working and not even the brute force of Mr. Westcott’s hand could save the poor machine. So, Mr. Westcott promises his wife that he will buy her a new one. Though, this new radio doesn’t end up being quite what the family would have expected.

When the new radio arrived, Mrs. Westcott is not impressed. The thing is ugly, and gigantic, with so many confusing dials and knobs. She tries numerous times, along with her husband, to get the thing to work, but it just keeps picking up electronic sounds from around the apartment building, from vacuum cleaners to electric shavers. Mr. Westcott brings in a man to fix it, and then the radio seems to be all right. Until Mrs. Westcott turns it on one day during dinner, and in between a lovely piano piece, they hear a man interrupt the music, yelling for someone to stop playing. After a moment, the music keeps on, and Mrs. Westcott was very surprised, but Mr. Westcott claims it was simply a play. The next time this happens, Mrs. Westcott recognizes the voices on the radio as people living in the apartment. With horror and fascination, she realizes that the radio is picking up on everyone’s private life. Mr. Westcott is at first in denial about this, but with proof he realizes it is true.

Mrs. Westcott spends nearly every spare moment at the radio, listening in on people’s lives. She cannot seem to stop listening, and the more the people grew angry and fought with one another, them more she was intent on listening. Soon enough, she tells her husband all the stories she has heard, filling him in on people’s lives and nearly sobbing that everyone on the radio is angry and complaining about money. Mr. Westcott grows upset, telling her he bought the expensive radio to please her, and that now she is only upset. Mrs. Westcott begins to panic and tells him to stop, telling him they are turning into the people on the radio.

When I first heard about The Enormous Radio, it was on a television show, a name I cannot recall, and I found it rather interesting. On the TV version, everything plays out very close to how the book depicts it, only I prefer the TV version’s ending rather than the book’s. In the TV version, it ends with Mrs. Westcott begging her husband to stop yelling, telling him, "They’ll hear us!" They show a small radio, the camera zooms out, and you can see the little radio sitting in someone else’s living room, broadcasting load and clear the sound of Mr. Westcott yelling at his wife.

I found this story very interesting, and very bizarre, like a Twilight Zone sort of story. I like everything about it, including the way it was written, and the way it was shown on TV. The only thing I wish were different is the fact that I did not see part of the beginning from the TV version of the story. As for any side thoughts, I don’t think I want a radio anymore.

The Characters:

Mrs. Westcott: I found Mrs. Westcott to be my favorite character. She is sensible, though a little nosy for listening in on people’s private lives, and naïve to the outside world. I think she really had a big character change.

In the beginning, she was simple, without worry, and seemed almost the rude, snippy type. Then she changes, once she listens into the lives of others, and begins to be kind, looking at the nicer people in the world and appreciating them over her greedy, mean friends.

How Mrs. Westcott was before her change: (From Mr. Westcott to Mrs. Westcott) "What’s turned you overnight into a covenant girl? You stole your mother’s jewelry before they probated her will. You never gave your sister a cent of that money that was intended for her—not ever when she needed it. You made Grace Howland’s life miserable, and where was all you piety and your virtue when you went to that abortionist?…"

How she was after her change: "A Salvation Army band was on the corner playing ‘Jesus is Sweeter.’ Irene drew on her husband’s arm and held him there for a minute, to hear the music. ‘They’re really such nice people, aren’t they?’ she said. ‘They have such nice faces. Actually, they’re so much nicer than a lot of the people we know.’ She took a bill from her purse and walked over and dropped it into the tambourine. There was in her face, when she returned to her husband, a look of radiant melancholy that he was not familiar with."

Mr. Westcott: A simple, serious man with a good bit of knowledge and much common sense and practicality. He has little to no character change, and seems to be slightly cold and skeptical throughout the story.

"’Oh, I’m sick!’ he shouted. ‘I’m sick to death of your apprehensiveness. The radio can’t hear us. Nobody can hear us. And what if they can hear us? Who cares?’" "From the radio in the living room, Jim heards 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. ‘It’s like looking in windows. You know you don’t have to listen to this sort of thing. You can turn it off.’"

The author provides plenty of evidence to show the reader how the characters are supposed to be, so much in fact that I had no trouble deciding what they were like.

Definitions:

1. Simile – A figure of speech that makes an explicit comparison between two unlike things, using a word such as like, than, as, or resembles.
1) "…and now it seemed to her that the new radio stood among her intimate possessions like an aggressive intruder."

2. Metaphor – A figure of speech that makes a comparison between two unlike things without the use of such specific words of comparison.

3. Personification – A figure of speech in which an object or animal is given human feelings, thoughts, or attitudes.
1) "…and now it seemed to her that the new radio stood among her intimate possessions like an aggressive intruder."

4. Allusion – a reference to someone or something that is known from history, literature, religion, politics, sports, science, or some other branch of culture.
1) "From the loudspeaker came a recording of the ‘Missouri Waltz.’ (A popular tune of 1916 by J. R. Shannon and Frederick Knight Logan.)

5. Hyperbole – A figure of speech that uses an incredible exaggeration, or overstatement, for effect.

6. Irony – In general, a discrepancy between appearances and reality.
1) In the Enormous Radio, it was irony when the reader knew that Mrs. Westcott could hear into the lives of others, while those others had no idea.

My Auto-Biography (Final Draft)

My Auto-Biography by: Deylah McCarty

Ah, the teenage years. It's true what they say, that those years are the most important of your life, but that doesn't mean it's always going to be a fun ride. Many times we don't even realize how much impact the choices we make during our younger years have on our entire life, and then by the time we do, it can be much harder to right what was wronged. For some of us we cannot even see what we’ve been doing to ourselves until we are much older, and much less able to fix what we see that’s not right in ourselves, nor as fast. Finding inner peace and happiness can be one of the toughest things along the road of life.
For me, middle school was one of the toughest experiences I ever went through. Although I tried to be quiet and blend in with the backdrop, I was considered weird and an easy target to succumb to being picked on. For someone like me, blending in and being hidden is nearly impossible whether I want to hide or not, most likely because of my very blue eyes and sometimes weird choice of clothing. Unfortunately, I was ridiculed often and annoyed even more so, which really made me question myself. When I think about it now, people might have acted the way they did around me to get my attention because they liked my weird personality. On the down side, I was very sensitive, easily flustered, and the drama of middle school was way beyond my control. Being as mature as I was then, the kids around me were idiotic in my eyes, always making stupid choices and acting completely ridiculous, but being only 13, I couldn’t have really been expected to do much about it.
One thing I hated the most about middle school, and about myself, was that I used to be extremely shy, meaning I was frequently embarrassed, which led to my cheeks turning very pink, and inevitably ended with people bothering me about it. It was horribly upsetting, and I had the mindset that it was never going to end. After all, how could I make my cheeks stop filling with blood? Or how could I possibly keep people off my back? I had fallen in to what I like to call ‘a rut.’ Rather than calling it depression, I would say that I’ve fallen into a rut and couldn’t get out because I just kept digging deeper rather than try to climb out. It is much easier to dig deeper and hide ourselves rather than use all of our strength to climb out. I was stuck in a pretty deep rut, and I had dug myself one hell of a hole.
Getting out of this rut was the next hardest thing in my entire life. When I explain how I did it here, there is no way to help you understand exactly how it was for me, but in a nutshell: hard work, self-encouragement, self-love, my mother’s support, and a therapist were what got me through. I went through years of struggle and determination, with blood, sweat, and tears, only for me there no blood was involved. I fought myself in a fierce battle, trying to invoke my deepest, most painful memories and stretch them out, examining every tiny bit of them until I understood everything. After a long road of fighting, I slowly came to peace with my inner fires and I changed, which changed the way I looked at the world around me. Therefore, I became my dream-self. The self that could walk into school without a second thought of my presence, the self that could say and do what I pleased without a care in the world.
Happy, outgoing, enormously confident, positive, hard-working, and popular—this is what I am now, and it’s a hard and well worth it job to manage. Keeping your head clear and your goals set is like keeping your room clean. Slack off, and it can get to how it used to be: littered, unorganized, stuffy, uncomfortable, and even embarrassing. Piles of clothing like giant, mental road blocks. Old, smelly food that constantly reminds you that you’re slacking. However, keep yourself on your toes, while picking up after yourself, and you can easily maintain a clean, nice room. As for bad days, you know they’re always going to be there, days where you just can’t keep your room tidy, but those kinds of days can be triumphed too. So just do the best you can, like I did, and try to keep your ‘room’ clean.