The Illusion of Choice in Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken"

            A deconstructive reading of Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" reveals that the road not taken doesn't make any difference at all.   High schools have been using this poem to motivate students for decades, but what teachers and students never seem to notice is that both roads are essentially equal; therefore there is no moral to the story about the road less traveled making all the difference.  Did Frost make a fundamental error in his poem or did he deliberately write the last line in a clever attempt of chicanery to winnow out the scholars from the masses, or is he commenting on the illusion of independence, freedom, and originality in American society?  I suspect the latter but that is a thesis for a different essay. 

            Deconstruction questions the artifice of binary oppositions because they are hierarchies that privilege one of the terms.  Once we discover it we can use the ideology at work.  In Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” the central tension in this text is conformity versus nonconformity.  This binary opposition is the key to the text’s main ideological framework, that nonconformity, or taking the path less traveled, is the desired choice in having a better life.  However, the underlying theme of the poem, that taking the route to nonconformity is the best choice, it is also an illusion skillfully administered by American society; both paths are essentially the same, but Frost makes himself believe that they are different and one is more correct than the other and that it has “made all the difference”.  The same goes for our American society, whose pave-your-own-way philosophy rests on the ideology of nonconformity and individualism.  We like to think that we are being independent, free, and original-three hallmarks of American ideology and what it is to be an American-but in effect it is all an illusion to make ourselves feel better, to make ourselves feel more unique than the next person when in reality we are all conforming to the same ideology.  As in the poem, there is a failure of the American public to recognize the lack of nonconformity, which is Frost’s point in the poem. 

For example, as the narrator in the poem comes to a fork in the road and has to choose between two paths and looks carefully at both of them before making his decision, he accedes that both of them are “just as fair” and that those passing through had “worn them really about the same” and that both of them “equally lay”.  Look as hard as he might, and “long he stood”, he really could find no difference between the two paths.  However, he tried to convince himself (or his audience) that they were different paths in order to justify his choice and to make it seem as though he took the more difficult yet more rewarding one.  He wrote that he took the other path because it had “perhaps the better claim/Because it was grassy and wanted wear” but to be truthful he had to go on to admit that “though for the passing there/had worn them really about the same” so he tried to justify his choice but couldn’t quite do it.  However, by the end of the poem the narrator has convinced himself that he made the ideal choice by saying that he took the one less traveled by, “and that has made all the difference”.  There is no contextual evidence in the poem that shows that one of the paths was less traveled than the other.  When the narrator tried to compare them he couldn’t admit to there being any significant difference, so by the end of the poem he just asserted a falsehood; that he took the one less traveled by.  Frost illustrated and challenged the artifice of the ideology of nonconformity being the privileged binary opposition by showing (through the narrator in his poem) that it is so ingrained in society that it is better to make yourself and others believe that you have taken the more difficult and original route than to admit to being ordinary and following in the footsteps of countless others.  His narrator conforms to this ideology by trying to convince himself and his audience that he took the ideal, the “less traveled” path in order to save himself the humiliation of admitting that he didn’t do anything particularly interesting, original, or different from what others would have done.

Another, less important binary opposition present in the poem is temporality versus permanence.  The narrator is acutely aware of the fact that he can only choose one path and cannot go back and take the other path because even if, as he tried to console himself when he “kept the first for another day”, it wouldn’t be the same because it would be a different day, a different moment, a different mood, and a different set of experiences leading up to that decision.  Although the narrator knows that (hence the long deliberation at the beginning of the poem before finally choosing a path) he tries to tell himself that he can always go back and take the other path as well.  Therefore he is attempting to immerse himself in the illusion of permanence-that he could always go back and take the other path if the one he chose turned out not to be of his liking.  In American society there is an ideology that if a person doesn’t like their career or chosen path, they can always go back and change it.  Although it is true that one can always change career paths or choices in life, it is not possible to go back in time to change a decision; the experiences, personal feelings at the time, and the moment itself cannot be relived.  At the end of the poem the narrator says that the decision he made in choosing one particular path over another “has made all the difference”.  However, how could he know that it has made all the difference when he could not go back to that exact moment in time and take the other path?  We like to think that we have made the right choices in life based on what our lives are like now, but we cannot truthfully make that assertion because we cannot go back in time and relive all the alternate possibilities to successfully determine whether or not we have, indeed, made correct decisions.  Therefore, the narrator illustrates the artificial ideology that not only can we make truthful assertions about the correctness of the decisions we have made in our lives, but also that we can go back and change the decision if it turns out to be undesirable.