Ethan Frome Reaction Paper

This summer, I was presented with the opportunity to read a classic book that goes by the name of Ethan Frome. At the beginning of the book, I was very lost and did not understand much of it because of the dialect that was being used in the book. As I kept reading it, I learned to accept it and I actually started to understand it a lot more. While reading this book, I had many thoughts about Ethan’s behavior, but my main thought was why would Ethan go and try to be with somebody else while he was already undoubtedly committed to a woman named Zeena? There are no exact reasons for why he did what he did but we can at least study the conflict and go deeper about the story as a whole.

The story in the book shows how Ethan was in love with Mattie. The only problem with that was that Ethan was already married to a woman named Zeena. Many marriages end because the husband or the wife cheats on their spouse. Most people go through life thinking ‘okay he/she is the one, I can feel it’ but unfortunately this does not work out for everyone. A lot of the time the person who they thought they knew turns out to be

Ethan and Mattie attempted to end their lives by sledding into the big oak tree. Unfortunately, they survived, but the incident ended up causing damage to their bodies. Zeena also lost because she had to take care of someone who betrayed her. The incident also caused damage to Ethan’s personality. Throughout the book, Ethan seems to be an all-around happy person until he attempted suicide. After the incident, he becomes a very quiet person. An engineer that Ethan started driving to Corbury Flats every day narrates the beginning of the story, and then the rest of the book is a flashback of Ethan’s life. Before the flashback starts, the engineer came to the conclusion that “Something in Ethan’s past history, or in his present way of living, had driven him too deeply into himself…to draw him back to his