Ethan Frome, a novel by Edith Wharton, is a story of ill-fated love, a tragic love story of simple people in a bleak New England environment. The main character is Ethan Frome, a man who has to drop out of school to take care of his sick mother. In this thesis the writer wants to find out the reasons of Ethan's failure and how the failure affects his life. The writer is going to use library research and also the theories of characterization and conflict as the devices in the analysis. The writer finds out that the reasons of Ethan's failure in his life are, his willingness to accept any conditions that he is in, his loneliness and his passivity. The effects of his failure are that Ethan has to
spend his life with a wife he does not love, he starts to have an affair with Mattie and he just realizes he makes a mistake by marrying Zeena. The end of the story we can see the worst result of his failure when he commits an unsuccessful suicide with Mattie. He has to live with his guilty feelings toward his wife, the crippled Mattie
and his broken dreams.