The Enormous Radio by John Cheever reminds me of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown in that everything seemed quite ‘normal’ in the beginning when the characters are introduced. It quickly goes downhill from there once Jim Westcott and his wife, Irene, acquires a radio to replace the one that became broken. Like how Goodman Brown goes on a journey into a dark forest and meets people that he thought he knew, Irene notices that the strange ugly radio was able to receive their neighbors’ sounds and the surrounding apartment complex. The shock of being able to listen to elevator, doorbells and even to the apartment next to their apartment led to an increased fascination of the radio. So much so that Irene purposely cuts her time short with her friends just to go back home and listen to the radio, as if overly addicted. She does transform to become a person who never leaves the house and invents a new goal in life, which is to only listen to the radio. By doing so, Irene changes her perspective of everything around her, including her husband, due to the influence of said radio. The Enormous Radio is a gothic story because it shares traits with Young Goodman Brown that involves a character changing what they consider to be their normality into a completely different one. In addition, the new radio that the Westcott’s purchased was rather strange and foreshadows the darkness that resulted in Irene’s and Jim’s marriage becoming conflicted at the conclusion of the story.

The only way I believe that The Enormous Radio would not be a gothic literature is if the story progresses like how it normally is, up until the point where instead of Irene becoming obsessed with the new radio, she would either dispose of it or attempt to stop crime as if she was trying to be like Batman. This is because the new, ugly radio functioned like what the modern American Federal Bureau of Investigation did after the deadly events of September 11th, 2001. The agency actually spied on the American population for fear of another terrorist attack. Many New Yorkers were also encouraged to report strange actions done in the MTA subway system, with many “If you see something, say something” advertisement posted all over MTA property.