Nature's Puppet

The narrator believes that Ethan is a representation of the environment as an embodiment of the somber and bleak landscape of Starkfield itself. "[Ethan] seemed part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface 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 accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters." (Introduction) He also believes that Ethan is an extension of the landscape, hiding his true self underneath the harshness of the winter.
             In chapter one, the overriding theme of the relationship of people and its environment is slightly furthered in this chapter. In this chapter a picture of the town is painted by the narrator in which images pop up of run down buildings withered by the harsh winters of Starkfield. The effect of living in such an environment is noted by the narrator, "The effect produced on Frome was rather of a complete absence of atmosphere, as though nothing less tenuous than ether intervened between the white earth under his feet and the metallic dome overhead. "It's like being in an exhausted receiver."" (Chapter I pg. 15) The author uses the word "darkness" throughout the novel to describe the initial views of how Ethan perceives the environment and it relates to how he feels. The narrator uses a description of the darkness of the church to precede his feelings of unhappiness when he views Mattie dancing in the hall. The darkness theme relates how Ethan's true thoughts are buried deep in the "dark" recesses of his soul and unable to come out much like the sun in Starkfield. In chapter 2 the sense of entrapment of his environment is finely captured when Ethan looks at his family gravestones and remarks "We never got away-how should you?" (Chapter II, pg.