The Enormous Symbol
On its surface, “The Enormous Radio” can be very misleading; its simple story seems like a gimmick. The generations raised on Twilight Zone and its host of remakes, reboots, inspirations and ripoffs are especially prone to missing the symbolism exuding from the radio that is anything but simple. Many reasons exist to explain why stories that don’t seem to be especially unique or complex stand the test of time and remain widely studied and anthologized decades or even centuries after publication. One of those reasons is the complexity of symbolic representation. “The Enormous Radio” is a perfect example of this type of story because the most obvious symbolic device is, of course, the title radio itself. The secret of the story’s longevity, however, is that identifying what the radio symbolizes is much less obvious. This is because readers have been trained to see a symbol utilized in a short story as being invested with a specific meaning and with good reason. Most stories are simply too tightly constructed and constricted to take a chance on confusing readers by giving multiple meanings to a single symbol when it is much easier and less confusing to simply introduce additional symbols. Making your story’s most obvious symbolic element stand for myriad possibilities is a daring choice best left to masters of the genre like John Cheever.
The Radio in the Garden of Eden
Life is good for the Westcotts before the arrival of the big radio. Not a perfect life by any means, but they saw the world and most of the people around them as decent and safe. In other words, they were in a state of innocence—one, perhaps, helped along by willing blindness to look too closely at that world—but still basically innocent. In this very popular interpretation of the story, the radio becomes even the serpent that tempts Eve (Mrs. Westcott) in the Garden of Eden, or the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil which is the endgame of the serpent. By eating from the fruit of the radio—whether devil or tool of the devil—ignorance gives way to information and innocence is stripped forever from the household.
Freud's Radio
For those who don’t care to apply Biblical symbolism, an alternate choice for the radio is the unleashing of the subconscious. It is a given fact that the Westcotts are complicit in constructing their Edenic sense of innocence about their neighbors. The question is to which degree this is a case of unconscious repression or conscious suppression of unpleasantness. Either way, the radio becomes the force by which that which has been pushed out of conscious awareness and into subconscious apprehension rises to the surface. As Mrs. Westcott’s paranoid suspicion and acute sensitivity to the potential darkness around her once she has been to exposed to the truth via the radio transmission confirms, it is practically impossible to stuff the genie back into the bottle once repression is unleashed.
Technophobia
The radio is also forwarded as a symbolic representation of every advancement in technology that comes to be seen as a threat to the status quo. The description of the trouble that Irene has in getting the radio to work is punctuated by the description of the green light it gives off as “malevolent” thus certifying that the radio is viewed with a certain amount of trepidation and suspicion. This is a very common reaction among many people to new innovations in old technology, not to mention brand new technology. When the radio turns out to possess seemingly malevolent powers, the symbolism becomes complete.
The Storyteller
Finally, the radio also becomes a symbolic stand-in for the author himself, with the reader taking on the role of the Westcotts. After all, what is the reader of “The Enormous Radio” really doing other eavesdropping in on the private lives and intimate secrets of strangers?
