The short story “The Enormous Radio” by John Cheever has many traits being gothic in nature. The story is about Jim and Irene Westcott who replace their broken-down radio with a new radio. This new radio can play music as well as play other people’s conversations. The story starts to show gothic elements such as gothic emotions and gothic hallmarks like pushing the limit. This is prevalent when the couple repeatedly uses the radio. As we read on we can start to notice that Irene’s perception of her relationship with John starts to be altered by the radio. This leads to her becoming more aggressive towards John and this, in turn, caused John to go towards the same path bringing up Irene’s past. By the end of the story, we see that Irene has trust issues and judges everyone.

One reason why the short story “The Enormous Radio” by John Cheever could not be gothic is because of the setting. The setting takes place in John’s and Irene’s house where there is no gothic style setting. Gothic style settings usually portray dark themes like crypts, churches, graves, underground, basements, attics, forests, darkness or dark spaces, bleak or stormy settings. This story has no substantial setting like those and is just a regular house. There is also a lack of return of normalcy. In the end, we see that Irene still portrays emotions such as trust issues and loses herself to her paranoia.