Student Question
What is the serious conflict in "The Road Not Taken"?
Quick answer:
The serious conflict in "The Road Not Taken" is between the easy and difficult choices, metaphorically represented by the two roads. Initially, both roads appear equally traveled, suggesting the choice was arbitrary. The speaker later justifies his choice of the "less traveled" road, hinting at a deeper conflict between truth and self-deception to rationalize the consequences of his decision.
The conflict in this poem appears to be the conflict between the easy and the difficult choice, represented metaphorically by the speaker's choice between two roads to take. The difficult choice is represented by the road "less traveled by," and the easy choice, implicitly, is represented by the road more traveled by. The speaker says that he took the road "less traveled by," and that "that has made all the difference." This is often interpreted to mean that the speaker is glad that he took the more difficult road, and the poem is often interpreted to be about taking the moral road and following your conscience, rather than taking the easier, although perhaps less moral, road just because most other people have taken it.
However, if we read the poem carefully, we will notice that when the speaker first describes the two roads, he describes them as "just as fair" as one another, and says that they had both been traveled, or "worn . . . really about the same." It is only later in the poem that he describes one as "less traveled by." The implication is that perhaps the speaker chose the wrong road to travel down, and thus made the wrong moral choice, and retrospectively tries to justify the decision by claiming that he took the road "less traveled by." The conflict in the poem is thus not so much the conflict between the easy or difficult path, or the moral or immoral path, but between what is true and what is untrue. The speaker distorts his own memory of what is true (that the choice between the two paths was arbitrary) in order to justify the choice he made. By convincing himself that there was a sound logic to his choice, he can better excuse himself of responsibility for the negative consequences of it.
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