The radio is examined and the problem apparently fixed, but the next day while Irene is listening to a Chopin prelude she hears a man and woman who seem to be arguing.
On the way home, Irene speaks of the stars like a little candle throwing its beam as to "shine a good deed in a naughty world."
"[5] Biographer Patrick Meanor writes: "The Enormous Radio" and "Torch Song", much longer, more psychologically sophisticated stories, eventually came to be to be considered two of Cheever's greatest and most popular works, not only for his new, highly developed lyrical style and brilliant character portraiture, but also his ability to evoke deep mythic resonance within the most mundane circumstances.
Blending realism, fantasy, comedy and pathos, and carefully manipulating these elements into a structure, Cheever illuminates some the darker regions of the human psyche.
[8]O'Hara adds that "The Enormous Radio" "ventured into something approaching existential awareness and raised serious ethical questions about personal involvement and self-delusion in the lives of his characters.
"[9] "The Enormous Radio" is a departure from Cheever's hitherto "naturalistic-realistic narratives" into a whimsical invocation of a fall from grace and the catastrophic consequences of self-knowledge.
[10] Biographer Patrick Meanor writes: "The Enormous Radio" is Cheever's earliest and most brilliant version of the "fall" from innocence into experience, from blissful ignorance into the horror of self-knowledge, and from a comfortable life of illusion into the unbearable reality.
[11]Meanor adds that the radio serves as "an agent of revelation" which, stripping the Westcotts of their self-complacency, leaves them bereft of their "urban Eden", intimately bound up with the idea of the house, gender, and family, which becomes through metaphor, a way of externalizing the inner life of fictional characters.
[16][17] The story was dramatized by Gregory Evans on the BBC World Service in the series City Plays, produced and directed by Gordon House.