The Enormous Room

Brown and Cummings endured three days of interrogation before the French government delivered them to a concentration camp. During his four months of incarceration, Cummings wrote his first autobiographical work, The Enormous Room. In this book, Cummings expressed his opposition to the systems that did him wrong: the French government for jailing an innocent man and the American government for leaving him out to dry . The Enormous Room served as another representation of Cummings’ stubborn independence, for he made the central theme of the book romantic individualism against oppression and…

taught by great family friends such as philosophers like William James and Josiah Royce. With his father, Edward Cummings, being a professor at Harvard and known as a Congregational minister of the Old South Church in Boston, E.E Cummings was inspired by his father success and grew to be just like him Edward Estlin Cummings. Just like his father, Cummings received education at Harvard University and earned a bachelor’s art degree as well as a master’s degree. After Harvard, Cummings shortly…

footsteps, Cummings graduated from Harvard in 1916. He quickly got drafted for the army, and during the first World War he served as an ambulance driver for the Norton Hayes Ambulance Service in France (CUMMINGS, E(dward) E(stlin) 1894-1962). The French soon detained him and sent him to a detention camp for almost three months based on the suspicion that he had “Pro-German” tendencies (Martin). Cummings’ close friend and colleague, who spoke openly against the French war effort, caused…

While Cummings started writing poetry at a young age, his first self published work was an autobiography. The Enormous Room was published in 1922 and contained Cummings’ experiences in jail during WWI. His next work, Tulips and Chimneys,was published in 1923 and contained numerous short poems. Cummings published more poems at around that time. (Biography.com). Cummings’ next work was the play Him, which was performed by the Provincetown Players in 1927. Then, he wrote Eimi in 1933, which was…

The unauthenticity of society In today’s society we focus a lot on authenticity and being authentic. We go to great lengths to make sure we are and everything we have is genuine. Unfortunately, in order to achieve this, we sometimes lose the very essence of what we were trying to achieve. John Cheever’s famous work, “The Enormous Radio” demonstrates just that. In this essay I will be focusing on the inauthenticity of society as illustrated in “The Enormous Radio”. I will argue that that the…

"[Irene Westcott] was struck at once with the physical ugliness of the large gumwood cabinet"(Cheever 251). While its size is immediately referred to upon the very first description of the radio, the emphasized quality of the radio is not its size, but its aesthetic dissonance. "Irene was proud of her living room...[but] the new radio stood among her intimate possessions like an aggressive intruder"(Cheever 251). The constant remarks in regard to the radio's physical appeal serve as more than…

In the short story “The Enormous Radio,” John Cheever describes for us what happens when people get addicted to anything, similar to what we saw in Fitzgerald’s Babylon Revisited. He shows how by obtaining a certain item, people get haunted with its function and can’t control themselves until it starts to affect their own lives. In this story, the abruption of the smooth sailing life of the Westcott family was the enormous radio that Jim bought for his wife Irene. People that are high up…

Success, in the scope of literature, has very often been depicted as a situation that only occurs when you are a high class citizen with connections, money, and have preserved an elite status. This translates into a perpetual cycle where society has developed unrealistic standards that are consistently prompted to be upheld in the middle class. John Cheever, in “The Enormous Radio”, “The Country Husband”, and “O’ Youth and Beauty”, portrays couples that struggle with fitting into these standards…

An Analysis of Obsession on the Knowledge of the Others’ Private Lives in John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio” The desire of discovering the others’ secrets is part of human nature, but it becomes a problem if it is too excessive. “The Enormous Radio,” by John Cheever, is a simple tale which can be interpreted as a lesson of life. The story focuses on Irene, a middle-class woman, who enjoys listening to the music on the radio. She is obsessed by the new radio which allows her to eavesdrop on…

enjoyed it because we were on our way to Florida!!This is great practice because one day I will have to do this again. We were able to get there at four thirty in the morning. We checked-in, went through security, and a man told us we had to go to gate 30B. We had oats and some juice. Then the T.S.A agents scanned our boarding passes and we went on the plane. In thirty minutes we were up in the air. When I looked out the window in the plane, it is like I can see the sky hitting the ground. At…