How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Yet I had come in the degenerate day of trolley, bicycle and rural delivery, when communication was easy between the scattered mountain villages, and the bigger towns in the valleys, such as Bettsbridge and Shadd's Falls, had libraries, theatres and Y. M. C. A. halls to which the youth of the hills could descend for recreation. (Prologue.17)
This passage shows how Starkfield has changed over the past 24 years. It announces that technology and modernization will have a role in this tragedy.
Quote #2
I had been sent up by my employers on a job connected with the big power-house at Corbury Junction, and a long-drawn carpenters' strike had so delayed the work that I found myself anchored at Starkfield-the nearest habitable spot-for the best part of the winter. (Prologue.18)
Technology and modernization are the very reasons the narrator is in Starkfield. This passage also points to increased concerns over laborers rights, and the rise of labor unions.
Quote #3
Another day, on getting into my train at the Flats, I missed a volume of popular science-I think it was on some recent discoveries in bio-chemistry-which I had carried with me to read on the way. (Prologue.32)
Ethan seems to be in pain after he reads the narrator's magazine. All the pain and regret over his lost education must have come flooding right back. It also creates a connection between the two men that has a lot to do with the narrator eventually getting invited back to Ethan's home.
Quote #4
"We're kinder side-tracked here now," he added, "but there was considerable passing before the railroad was carried through to the Flats." (Prologue.55)
The railroad does not stop in Starkfield. It does stop in other towns. For some reason Starkfield got left off of the map to progress.
Quote #5
"But after the trains begun running nobody ever come by here to speak of and mother never could get it through her head what had happened, and it preyed on her right along till she died." (Prologue.55)
This is just more evidence that Starkfield has been running backwards for quite some time, and that its inhabitants didn't know how to deal with it. It also shows how sometimes progress for one place, can lead to isolation for another.
Quote #6
Ethan's love of nature did not take the form of a taste for agriculture. He had always wanted to be an engineer, and to live in towns, where there were lectures and big libraries and "fellows doing things." (4.7)
This quote could also go under "Dreams, Hopes, and Plans," but we want it here to show Ethan's desire for progress, and modernity. His life is the exact opposite of what he wants it to be.
Quote #7
Zeena's native village was slightly larger and nearer to the railway than Starkfield, and she had let her husband see from the first that life on an isolated farm was not what she had expected when she married. (4.7)
Again, the path of the train determines so much. Zeena is too good for Starkfield, but, because she's married to Ethan (who is poor) she's not good enough for her hometown, or any town above it, at least in her mind. This class anxiety paralyzes her, and Ethan too.
Quote #8
Ethan was aware that, in regard to the important question of surgical intervention, the female opinion of the neighbourhood was divided, some glorying in the prestige conferred by operations while others shunned them as indelicate. (7.14)
This passage speaks to the medical side of technology. We have made incredible advances in medical science since those days, though much of the workings of the human body and mind remain a mystery.