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The Road Not Taken And Alistair Macleod's The Boat

1363 Words6 Pages

“It is our choices…that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities” (Rowling 333). Every moment of a persons’ life they are facing a choice. That choice might be to eat an apple or a donut for breakfast or it might be to invest in stock x today or hope it drops and wait. Some people’s choices are harder than others. Yes, a donut or an apple is a choice, but either way the person is eating breakfast and is getting sustenance. Now, what if the choice was faced by a mother that they could eat breakfast today, or their child could, and she cannot choose both, there simply is not enough. Some choices have more impact than others. Some choices are between your life and someone else’s life and there is always a choice, even if it is only …show more content…

In Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken and Alistair MacLeod’s The Boat, both narrators are faced with choices and they cannot choose both. The narrator of Frost’s poem is facing a junction in the woods and he knows that he is one traveler and that he cannot choose to travel both and that once he has travelled one he cannot then decide to travel the other. The son in The Boat is facing a choice between the world of the books and the world of the boat. He knows that he cannot choose both as his father tried unsuccessfully to straddle both worlds and was miserable. They both ponder their decisions for some time, but ultimately they both make the decision they think is best for them. The narrator of the Road Not Taken, tries to look down the path as far as he can and decide that way while the son in The Boat knows that either choice will end in someone’s misery, but does not know the path that he will take and what choices will be presented to him along the way. Being aware of future events on the path that one chooses to take does not change the final outcome of the culmination of those choices. In both The Road Not Taken and The Boat, the outcome is

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The speakers in “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost and “Choices” by Nikki Giovanni reflect on the choices and how they can make a difference in life. First, the speaker in Frost’s poem tells about a decision he once made and how it “has made all the difference” in his life. One autumn morning he stands at a fork in the road, deciding which road to take, and he chooses to take the road less traveled according to the lines 7 and 8: “And having perhaps the better claim/Because it was grassy and wanted wear.” Once the choice is made, the speaker expresses that there is no going back to undo what’s been done or redo what’s been left behind: “Yet knowing how way leads on to way/I doubted if I should ever come back.” In fact, he can only reminisce

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In the poem, “The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost uses beautifully crafted metaphors, imagery, and tone to convey a theme that all people are presented with choices in life, some of which are life-altering, so one should heavily way the options in order to make the best choices possible. Frost uses metaphors to develop the theme that life 's journey sometimes presents difficult choices, and the future is many times determined by these choices. Throughout the poem, Frost uses these metaphors to illustrate life 's path and the fork in the road to represent an opportunity to make a choice. One of the most salient metaphors in the poem is the fork in the road. Frost describes the split as, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both (“The Road Not Taken,” lines 1-2).

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