Essay on Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken - It Made All the Difference

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The Road Not Taken: All the Difference

Each person must make many decisions in their lifetime. Some decisions are easy while others are more difficult. The poem "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost is a first person narrative tale of a monumental moment in Frost’s life. Frost is faced between the choice of a moment and a lifetime. Walking down a rural road the narrator encounters a point on his travel that diverges into two separate similar paths. In Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken", Frost presents the idea of man facing the difficult unalterable predilection of a moment and a lifetime. This idea in Frost's poem is embodied in the fork in the road, the decision between the two paths, and the speaker's decision.

Man's life can be metaphorically related to a physical journey filled with many twists and turns. Through out this journey there are instants where choices between alternate paths have to be made- the route man decides to take is not always an easy one to determine. The fork in the road represents the speaker's encounter of having to choose from two paths a direction that will affect his the rest of his life ( ). Frost presents to the reader a moment in anyone's life where an arduous problematic choice has to be made. There are an abundance of options in life man faces; Frost symbolizes this into the diverging of the two paths in his poem. The decision for which path to choose from can be hard to accept, just as the revelation of the choices.

The two paths represent the options man has to choose from. Faced with these decisions, man has to weigh his options carefu...

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...e ways. Faced with very similar choices man tries to examine what they have to offer, but often is not able to for tell the consequences. Man can opt to go the common route, which is the more reliable, and have a common life or he can choose the less common route, which is unknown and often difficult, and have a unique life that stands out above everyone else's life. The choices a person makes in life are ultimately responsible for their future, yet at the same time a person can never go back to the past and experience other possibilities. It is unfeasible to predict the outcomes of capital decisions we make; often it is essential to make these decisions fixed on nothing more than questioning which selection will provide fulfillment. In the end, we reflect over the decisions we have made, and like Frost, sigh, discovering they have made "all the difference."

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