The speaker says that he plans to tell people “ages and ages hence” that he

took the [road] less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

This statement implies that he wants to be seen as someone individualistic—a person who forges his own path. He’s already told readers that “the passing there / Had worn [the roads] really about the same” and that “both that morning equally lay” in untrodden leaves, so readers know that there actually is no “road less traveled.” It seems that the speaker, then, is planning to distort the mundane truth of his choice to indicate that it had greater significance. Perhaps he plans to do this because he wants people to see him as brave and unique; perhaps he also wants to encourage the belief that one can make brave and unique choices in general.

The speaker’s consideration of the tale he might tell in the future is consistent, too, with the way people consider their lives as narratives in themselves. Indeed, sometimes—as seems to be true in the speaker’s case—a choice is merely a momentary experience in comparison to its long-term effects, in the form of a story to be told and retold. Like many of us, the speaker shares the human drive for a narrative structure that provides an easy beginning, middle, and end, and that implies the worthiness of the story told, not to mention the life behind it.

The speaker knows, though, that this structure can easily be a lie, and so he approaches it with weary humor and irony. The poem concludes not with the speaker’s deliberation but with the story he imagines he might, one day, tell. In this way, the poem’s structure enacts the trajectory of the speaker’s thought, and readers are left with the echoes of the speaker’s grandiose, self-mocking pause and somewhat fabricated moral. The choice only matters insofar as it creates and contributes to the narrative—and the narrative, the speaker implies, is all that lasts.