Author: yamil

In “The enormous radio” by John Cheevers there are elements of this story being gothic. We meet a couple Jim and Irene westcott that get a new radio that plays music and also can hear sound from other apartments. Some gothic elements examples that “the enormous radio” has is dread. Irene seems to me a bitter and just mad women, she doesn’t like things she hears and just is mad at everything bringing negative energy. From hearing from her radio she also finds out about Mr. Osborn beating up his wife. What she is doing is very wrong but yet she still does it sitting there and listening to her neighbors which is very wrong and shouldn’t be done. This ruined her relationship with her husband making the whole situation negative and making him more judgmental and less loving.

Also, in “The enormous radio” by John Cheevers there are also non gothic traits like the huge one is the setting. Gothic settings take place in like castles, or anything that’s like dark and gloomy setting. They live in a normal place with normal people and nothing that has to do with magic or a gothic setting. Also Irene lives a normal life, there is no return back to reality and isn’t like in a dream or in something supernatural setting that she comes back to live in her normal life, she lives a normal life even though it’s messed up and not how you wanna live she lives a pretty normal life with her neighbors who also live a normal life expect Mr. Osborn for what he did.

1- One out of the 5 more important ideas in the article was the information given prior to relate to now. (Page 4)

2- second most important idea was the use of degradation, cruelty and many more of those negative ideas (page 5)

3- Third most important idea was the supernatural sequences that happens, magic and more of that type of supernatural (Page 6)

4- Forth important idea is also women in distress, as a male figure has to come and recuse (page 7)

5- The last important idea is suspense and having people on their toes when reading (Page 8)

We have read 6 stories and out of the 6 my favorite one has to be The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe. To think I wouldn’t like this story because of the murder of the cats I found myself liking the story not because of the murder of the cats but the storyline. I find it interesting how some of these cases happen, for example what drive’s someone to murder someone and the factors that are also in play. In the Black Cat we see the person murder but his alcoholism is also a huge reason behind this. The alcoholism made him murder not one but two cats and his wife out rage off because of the alcohol, of course the alcohol isn’t the only reason as this guy is already crazy because he killed someone but the alcohol also added more into the reason he had committed these murders. This story also was very straight to the point, I say straight to the point in the way that we are introduce to the person, wife and cats and almost instantly it goes to him drinking heavily and causing these murders. Also when I read the title I was expecting a story about a black cat that maybe was bad luck or something negative because of symbolic meaning behind blacks cats but no, it was just a straight murder of two cats and his wife. I had also caught on to something as I kept read this story, I quickly made a connection to this Netflix documentary called “Don’t F*** with cats”, The documentary shows a sicko who murdered kittens on the internet and posted it and later was caught and was responsible for murders on humans as well. I quickly made that connections just because they shared that similarity of them killing cats and then moving into a human like they both did.

-Yamil serrano