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Last week, I came to the conclusion that the speaker of The Road Not Taken resigns to end the poem and its internal story by making its ending a happy one. I think they claim they have no regrets in choosing the path they traveled not only to give themself a sense of closure but also for the sake of creating a satisfactory story to share with others in the future. I found myself wondering why the speaker feels obligated to end the poem with a tone of certainty, and, if it is for the sake of telling it well, why they would even bother if the certainty they boast is false. It would make sense that they would feel pressured to tell the story this way, making its happy ending deceptively false.Â
So why does the speaker seem to insist on giving the story a happy ending? Stories are known to end in many ways: tragically, open-ended, happily, or paradoxically, etc. I think the answer might lie in the fact that the poem’s author, Robert Frost, wrote this as he lived in early twentieth-century America. This was a time of uncertainty and doubt for not only predominantly Christian Americans, but for people of faiths all around the world; scientific innovations threatened the popular belief that God is the cause of everything, and nothing can be done to alter the physical circumstances of the world and the social circumstances of its people but prayer.
With this in mind, it makes sense that Frost’s speaker (reflective of all other people of a time where most people shared the same beliefs) would subscribe to the narrative that a good life story has a happy ending, because the predominantly Christian population of America held strongly to the belief that good people enjoyed happy lives. So they wrote themself a happy ending to satisfy expectations for a “good” life story, thus convincing the listener that their life was good.
But instead of trying to convince this listener that their life was good and therefore they were a good person, why didn’t the speaker answer honestly that their life was mediocre and that they felt uncertain about their choices?
We as readers of the poem know that, but why is the speaker afraid of spreading this knowledge through their face-to-face social interactions in the future, when they’re telling these stories to people they connect with? I think the answer lies in the fear of judgment from others, which we are taught to expect in American society. We are still taught that if we follow the rules of working hard, being kind to others, and having a healthy fear of authority, we will be granted happiness, and therefore have a good life. The speaker fears the judgment that is more unspoken: if you don’t have a good life, you mustn’t have followed the rules, and therefore deserve strife and a difficult life.
Though the ideals that the life a person lives is totally deserved based on how well they followed the rules is entirely untrue, it still affects the way we think about our own lives and life stories. Take the speaker for example. They were obviously afraid to include regrets and uncertainty in the story he would tell later, which is why they tell us that later (with a sigh), they will say they took “the [road] less traveled by” (19), and owe their life to it.Â
However, because he wrote a poem in which the speaker plans to tell a dishonest story about his life in the future, I wonder what that implies about twentieth-century American culture, which has resulted in the twenty-first century culture we currently take part in. I wonder how many Americans are still very much like Frost’s speaker, socially anxious because we have been taught to fear others’ judgment, and therefore revising the way we socialize with one another to avoid being socially ostracized. Resulting in an American life of social dishonesty. Perhaps next week, I shall continue to elaborate on these ideas.