Author: Steven Ng

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 11^th, 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.

The five most important ideas from Alan Lloyd-Smith’s “American Gothic”, in my opinion, are:

1. Substitution (Middle of Page 4)
2. Influences that real life circumstances are based off of (Middle of Page 4)
3. Human struggles used in popular media (Bottom of Page 4 to Top of Page 5)
4. “Good versus Evil” (Bottom of Page 5 to Top of Page 6)
5. Science and the Supernatural (Middle of Page 6)

Out of the six stories listed, the one story that catches my fascination is “The Captive”, by Jose Luis Borges. This is a short story that has its framework established with a beginning and some sort of conclusion to its tale. Part of my fascination for this story stems from my interest in its historical roots, in that it is set sometime during the colonization periods between the 1500s and 1800s in the time of the Age of Exploration. However, what really intrigued me the most is the mysterious circumstances that ‘the boy’ has experienced between the point of his kidnap to his fateful reunion with his parents. It forces us, the reader, to question or maybe even attempt to brainstorm what transpire such a change, which resulted in him losing his native tongue and having a toughened body. One possible idea may be that the boy managed to escape from his captors but could not return to his village because he was not familiar with his current surroundings. Perhaps, the boy may even have traveled to the ‘old world’ without the readers ever knowing since the story never stated time frames before and after the time lapse. Maybe, in order to survive, he had to adapt and learn the European language, which is why we witness his confusion towards the end of the short story. It is these uncertainties that piques my interest into this short story that, if I were ever given the chance to, would greatly expand upon Mr. Borge’s story. And despite giving us a minuscule amount of information regarding the boy’s transformation, “The Captive” reminds me of a story that goes by the name of “The Hatchet”, by Gary Paulsen. Admittedly, I have not read “The Hatchet” in a long time, but it somehow gives off the same vibes as “The Captive”, in that if the short story is lengthened, it can be about the boy’s initial struggles, survival and his eventual change.

For reference, “The Hatchet” is also about a young boy who was forced to learn how to survive in the modern Canadian forest by himself after his pilot suffers a heart attack en route to the young boy’s destination on a small plane. Brian, the story’s protagonist, improvises his forest home, adapts to his situation, and overcomes hardships with the use of his trusty hatchet. At the end of “The Hatchet”, Brian gets rescued and returns to society as a changed man that had survived in the forest for fifty-two days. Unlike “The Captive”, the reader knows the exact details of Brian’s hardships and struggles that he was forced to endure as soon as his plane had crash landed. Be that as it may, “The Captive” carries unlimited potential of storytelling that the reader can conjure up in order to fill the missing gap that Mr. Borge has left us between the boy’s abduction and his homecoming.