Ethan personifies the grievous waste of failed greatness. His body, a metaphor for his spirit, is described as “lame” and “warped,” and his once gallant and noble head rests on once “strong shoulders” which are now “bent out of shape.” In Ethan, the narrator confronts a prodigious soul grown weary, warped, and lame, and the narrator sees in Ethan’s ghastly alteration the suffering of a misspent life. Ethan, believing his renunciation of Mattie was motivated by a sense of honor, fails to see that the moral significance of the situation was not as clear and definable as he believed. Centering his choice on duty, not love, Ethan failed to consider the effect of his decision on Zenobia, in a marriage with a man who found her abhorrent, or on Mattie, who apparently did love him. Frome also never understood his own fear of change and of intimate sexual expression.