Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, a poem revered for decades, portrays the decisions we face in life; through a narrative. With each of its four stanzas incorporating different literary devices to create a solid storyline, open to interpretation by the reader.

A narrative; “a story told, by a narrator about events that may by factual, fictional, or mythical.” (Threadgold 232) described here by Terry Threadgold, is one literary category Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken comes under, due to it containing, “the principal parts of a narrative – setting, complication, climax, denouement, and coda” (Threadgold 231). The setting takes place in a “yellow wood” (Frost 127) where two paths diverge, and the complication comes from deciding which of the two paths the narrator should travel along. The climax arrives when the narrator finds himself torn between his decision and is shortly followed by the denouement when he makes his decision on which path to take, concluding with saying “and that has made all the difference” (Frost 127): the coda. Frost’s poem is also open to interpretation by the reader, whereby they “[do] not necessarily follow the txt’s or the narrative’s instructions” (Threadgold 232), an act that leads to a deeper sense and meaning of the poem. Making it easy to distinguish a metaphorical link between the difficult decisions individuals make in their lives, and the decision between the paths the narrator must make.

The connection between Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken and the decisions faced in life is one determined through the literary devices used by the author. In the first stanza Frost sets the scene with “two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both” (Frost 127) this is the first sense of a metaphor, whereby the narrator tells of how he comes across two paths and must decide between them, not unlike when we are