What is the significance of the Enormous Radio in the story? Is this a real or a surreal element in the story? In what ways does the Radio function to expose the reality of American middle class life?

The radio serves as a modern day Pandora’s Box that when opened, allows all the darker aspects of human nature to fly and become exposed. Once out, there’s no putting the genie back into the bottle, to mix a metaphor. The only item left in Pandora’s box was hope and even that is gone for the Westcotts. Where they once lived in blissful ignorance of the worst side of their neighbors and once casually left their own failings unexposed to the harsh light of truth, now they are aware. Their consciousness thus raised, they cannot even stop from illuminating their own examples of their darkness that flies forth from their own box no bereft of even hope for going back to happy ignorance.