Sweeping POV In Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome

Sweeping POV: The Reason Behind The Three Narrators The title character from Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome is an enigma. His memory of when he visited Florida (the one time he actually left Starkfield) is buried under the monotonous experience of dealing with the snow year in and year out. When an unnamed engineer stays in town due to a union strike, he asks around and finds out bits and pieces of Frome’s life out of curiosity. Two important people he asks are Harmon Gow and Mrs. Hale. They’re important because they have an insight into Frome’s life that he doesn’t, yet he also has a college education, thus possibly having an insight that they don’t. With the introduction of the three characters, Wharton sets up the three possible narrators of the framed story: Harmon Gow, Mrs. Hale, and the unnamed engineer. The way Harmon Gow (the first person the engineer asked about Frome) is used as a potential narrator demonstrates a limited, but still informing, way of understanding Frome. Harmon’s way of thinking is narrowed down to survival and the best way to prolong it. The rationality means that while even though Harmon does know Ethan Frome as a fellow citizen of Starkfield, he doesn’t know Ethan as an …show more content…
Although Ethan does have physical and emotional troubles, the Engineer knows that Ethan’s main problem is intellectual. This gives the Engineer a more complete idea of Ethan’s story. Even though the Engineer is making up most of the story, the idea that Ethan Frome wants to improve himself intellectually is shown by the fact that he read the Engineer’s popular science literature. He knows that he did not know some of the things in the book and even admitted that science “used to” interest him (6). The Engineer thus found out something about Ethan Frome that Harmon Gow and Mrs. Hale could not, due to his