In the story of Ethan Frome, the narrator even though wasn’t directly in the action of the story is actually the main character of the novel. The actual tale of Ethan and his love for Mattie Silver is a figment of the narrator’s imagination. In the story, when the narrator stayed a night at the Frome’s, Wharton writes “It was that night that I found the clue to Ethan Frome, and began to put together this vision of his story…” (12). This quote shows that the narrator put in the rich details of the story himself. This is also how the narrator affected the outcome of the story, he used his own ideals and thoughts and put them in to describe what he thought the characters did all that time ago. Everyone in the town would have heard about the details