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The Road Not Taken And Alistair Macleod's The Boat

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“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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