Ethan Frome Passage Analysis

Ethan Frome Passage Analysis

“The next morning, when I looked out, I saw the hollow-backed bay between the Varnum spruces, and Ethan Frome, throwing back his worn bear skin, made room for me in the sleigh at his side. After that, for a week, he drove me over every morning to Corbury Flats, and on my return in the afternoon met me again and carried me back through the icy night to Starkfield. The distance each way was barely three miles, but the old bay’s pace was slow, and even with firm snow under the runners we were nearly an hour on the way. Ethan drove in silence, the reins loosely held in his left hand, his brown seamed profile, under the helmet-like peak of the cap, relieved against the banks of snow like the bronze image of a hero. He never turned his face to mine, or answered, except in monosyllables, the questions I put, or such slight
I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound
At this point in the novel, the speaker has been sent by his employer to the small, remote, rural town of Starkfield, Massachusetts. His visits to the post office there frequently corresponded with those of Ethan Frome. Ethan Frome is such a striking and tragic figure that he piques the speaker’s curiosity. He asks local folks about Frome and his “story” and hears about Frome’s family tragedy and the “smash-up” that caused his physical disabilities. Some people refuse to discuss Frome at all, which only creates greater curiosity in the speaker. When the horses he has been using fall ill, the speaker employs Ethan Frome to drive him back and forth to a neighboring town. As a result of this employment – the shared time and a forced overnight stay in Frome’s home – the speaker pieces together Ethan’s