Starkfield and other towns in the region’s pre-trolley days, provides further background on Frome. From Gow the narrator learns of Ethan’s age and of his reluctance to escape Starkfield because of obligations to care for his failing parents. The narrator also hears not only Gow’s chilling comment on Ethan’s endurance—“Ethan’ll likely touch a hundred”—but also his opinion that Ethan’s stay in Starkfield constituted a kind of imprisonment: “Guess he’s been in Starkfield too many winters. Most of the smart ones get away” (p. 9). The narrator’s interview of Gow develops the tale only “as far as his [Gow‘s] mental and moral reach permitted” (p. 10), and he hopes that the more educated, sophisticated Mrs. Ned Hale, with whom he is staying, will provide greater insight. He cannot cut through her reserve and reticence, however, even though she has more firsthand knowledge of the aftermath of the accident that scarred Frome’s forehead. Implying a suffering too great for words, her only comment is: “It was awful” (p. 12).

The narrator infers that he must piece together Ethan’s story from different sources, and that consequently each retelling will be a little bit different. The meaning of the story, he infers, will be found even in gaps or silences after he has accumulated a succession of hints, suggestions, and clues that surround Frome. For all the narrator’s curiosity about the Frome household, this technique gives his telling an elliptical effect, a sense that much has been left unsaid or not fully articulated. When the winter snows prevent the narrator’s return to Starkfield after Frome volunteers to drive him to his business appointment, he is granted a night’s shelter at the farm. Enveloped by the severe storm, the narrator experiences a “soft universal diffusion more confusing than the gusts and eddies of the morning.” In the “formless night” his disorientation temporarily intensifies, and “even [Ethan‘s] sense of direction, and the bay’s homing instinct, finally ceased to serve” (p. 17). The narrator’s perplexity and bewilderment imply a need to reorient himself, to jolt himself, so to speak, into a perspective that demands clearer sight and more acute insight. It is at this point that Wharton effects the transition back to the period of Ethan’s youth. Although some critics have quarreled with the subjective nature of her narrator’s perceptions, there seems little doubt that Wharton intended his narrative to be more than one version of events among others. Accordingly, it is a “vision”; in her 1922 introduction she noted: “Only the narrator has scope to see it all, to resolve it back into simplicity, and to put it in its rightful place among his larger categories.”

In structural terms, the opening of the door to Frome’s farm house marks the end of the novel’s introductory frame. The narrator has literally brought the reader to the threshold of Frome’s private world. This narrative threshold, marked by an ellipsis, signals the transition from one crucial piece of the story to another, a rather imprecise line that separates Frome’s outer and inner worlds. What occupies the space between the opening and closing frames is the narrator’s imaginative vision, his attempt to offer a way out of his temporary disorientation and a way to picture the essential elements of the tragic story.

If this narrative device solved Wharton’s structural challenge by introducing a nearly perfect symmetry to the tale, it also offered temporal perspective on events that happened a generation earlier. The narrator notes something in Ethan’s “past history” or his “present way of living” (p. 15) that has driven him more deeply into himself. The narrator arrives in Starkfield in “the degenerate day of trolley, bicycle and rural delivery, when communication was easy between the scattered mountain villages, and the bigger towns in the valleys, such as Bettsbridge and Shadd’s Falls, had libraries, theatres and Y. M. C. A. halls to which the youth of the hills could descend for recreation” (p. 10); but he is offered a glimpse into a life that had been shut down in Ethan’s young manhood. This contrast between past and present reinforces the reader’s understanding that the plot of Ethan’s story hinges on a temporal outline in which the climax (or anticlimax) occurred a generation later than the initial acts of the tragedy.

The opening frame of the novel, essentially a prolonged transit up to the door of the farmhouse, offers an entree (both literal and figurative) into Frome’s private world. If the term “frame” connotes a structural principle, the introductory and closing sections, as already suggested,