The novel consistently explores the theme of loneliness. Early on, the narrator remarks about Ethan Frome, "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." Ethan's home is depicted as "one of those lonely New England farm-houses that make the landscape lonelier." The introduction of the railroad reduced local traffic, a change Ethan's mother never comprehended. "It preyed on her right along till she died," Ethan confides to the narrator. As his mother's dementia intensifies, she becomes so uncommunicative that Ethan begs her to "say something." His fear of being isolated on the farm after his mother's passing prompts him to marry Zeena. When Mattie initially comes to live with the Fromes, Zeena encourages her to find distractions, believing it was "thought best... not to let her feel too sharp a contrast between the life she had left and the isolation of a Starkfield farm."