Ethan Frome Reflection

Despite reading, analyzing and even discussing Ethan Frome with others, I was never able to find any sort of meaning or lesson at the end of the book. To put the main characters in awful pain for an entire story, only for that pain to never be resolved or shown to have a purpose in educating the reader was perplexing to me. I’ve always been taught to seek out meanings and to learn from the stories I read, and the lack of a message in Ethan Frome made me feel as if there was no purpose in the story, and many critics have felt the same way. Lionel Trilling, a well-regarded critic of the mid 1900’s, wrote an essay in 1956 called “A Morality of Inertia” which discussed the same troubling fact that I had discovered: Ethan Frome had no lesson to