In chapter one of Ethan Frome, how can the atypical engineer be trusted by the reader as a narrator?Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome

Among the traits of the typical engineer are a strong
analytical and logical mind; an engineer has a mind for detail and is technically
educated; he also possesses a skilled manner of
communication.

The narrator of Ethan
Frome, who has been sent on a job connected with the powerhouse at Corbury
Junction that is delayed because of a carpenters' strike,finds himself at odds at first;
however, he settles into a routine as he finds himself "anchored at Starkfield." There
he learns of Ethan Frome, and after the town's horses fall ill in an epidemic, he must
rely on the broken figure of Ethan Frome to drive him to the train in Corbury
Flats.

That the narrator is atypical of a technical,
mathematical, and analytical engineer is evinced in his comments about Frome as he first
rides with him,

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Ethan From drove in silence, the reins loosely
held in his left hand, his brown seamed profile, under the helmet-like peak of the cap,
relieved against the banks of snow like the bronze image of a hero....He seemed a 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; but there was nothing unfriendly
in his silence.

Here a more
artistic and intuitive personality, rather than a dispassionately logical and analytical
nature that characterizes the narrator/engineer. To conceive of Frome as heroic and
almost mythical, is clearly a supposition on the part of this narrator. However, he does
typically communicate well with Frome, who offers him shelter for the night at his farm.
And, the chapter ends with the narrator telling the
reader,

It was
that night that I found the clue to Ethan Frome and began to put together this vision of
his story.

The use of the
word vision yet suggests that the narrator is not constructing a
story that is totally factual, totally documented, totally objective; this action on the
part of the narrator is atypical, also. Thus, as critic Cynthia Griffin Wolff notes,"it
[the story]bears the imprint of the narrator's own interpretation,and is, therefore,
somewhat ambiguous." Wolff concludes that the narrator's relating of Frome's tale wavers
from concrete reality in that it depicts his own

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shadow self, the man he might become if the
reassuring appurtenances of busy, active, professional, adult mobility were taken from
him.

The line between the
narrator as the teller, and the narrator as part of the story often become confused, and
because of this ambiguity, the story is not one of a typical engineer. And, certainly,
Chapter I indicates the narrator's personal perceptions of young Ethan's feelings which
could easily be reflective of his own as he walks through the snow and looks into the
windows. Lines such as these,

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It was during their night walks back to the farm
that he felt most intensely the sweetness of this communication....it seemed to Ethan
that the art of definition could go no farther, and that words had at last been found to
utter his secret
soul.

suggest the blurring of
the lines between the narrator as storyteller and the narrator as part of the
story.