The Enormous Radio Literary Elements

A short story

The events take the place in Sutton Place, New York.

The story is told from the third point of view by the omniscient narrator.

Tone is calm, sometimes grim, while mood is depressing.

Jim and Irene Westcott are the protagonists of the story. Irene’s mood of depression and of sudden questioning of everything is the antagonist.

There are two major conflicts. The first one is person vs. the truth. For instance, Irene doesn’t acknowledge the fact that she is not better than her neighbors. The second conflict is person vs person. Jim is seemingly unsatisfied with his marriage.

The scene in which Jim reveal the truth about their marriage and some dirty details from their past is a climax of the story.

Jim was too tired to make even a pretense of sociability, and there was nothing about the dinner to hold Irene’s interest.
This sentence proves that Jim and Irene’s marriage is not happy at all. They haven’t seen each other for the whole day but have neither a wish nor interest to communicate or even look at each other.

“I found a good-sized diamond on the bathroom floor this morning,” a woman said. “It must have fallen out of that bracelet Mrs. Dunston was wearing last night.” “We’ll sell it,” a man said. “Take it down to the jeweler on Madison Avenue and sell. Mrs. Dunston won’t know the difference, and we could use a couple of hundred bucks…”

The story alludes to Schubert, Mozart, Chopin.

Imagery is used to describe the lives of Irene and Jim’s neighbors as well as their own.

- “I’ve been listening all day, and it’s so depressing.”
- “Well, if it’s so depressing, why do you listen to it?”

N/A

I’ve talked with Miss Armstrong in the Park. (The Park is metonymy that stands for Central Park).
Irene went into the living room before she took off her hat or her furs and tried the instrument. (Furs is synecdoche that stands for a fur coat.)

The lamentation of a vacuum cleaner.