Response to Frost and "The Road Not Taken"

I like your interpretation of Frost's "The Road Not Taken." I think it very much makes sense considering that both roads look the same, as you point out.

I am reminded of the words of theologian Jonathan Edwards, who said:

And therefore I observe, that the Will (without any
metaphysical refining) is, That by which the mind chooses any
thing. The faculty of the will, is that power, or principle of mind,
by which it is capable of choosing: an act of the will is the same as an act of choosing or choice. - On the Freedom of the Will

It seems then that in making this series of uneducated guesses and hopes throughout life, we are exercising our free will, for free will is defined here as making a choice, although we may not know which choices were the best until after the fact. However, I have always wondered whether these choices really are choices at all.

The Naturalism movement in American literature thought that indifferent forces outside ourselves governed our behavior, thus making us products of our surroundings. As Donald Pizer writes in Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, "The naturalist often describes his characters as though they are conditioned and controlled by environment, heredity, instinct, or chance." Thus, these so-called "choices," it seems to me, are not actually choices, but mere responses to external stimuli; life becomes not a series of guesses and hopes disguised as rational choices, but a wave we ride in which forces beyond ourselves are pushing us along. The real facade is not fooling ourselves into thinking we are making rational choices, but instead fooling ourselves into thinking we have any say in what paths we take.

I have long debated with myself which view of life I prefer to take, and I think I tend to agree with the Naturalists, who tried to study life objectively and wrote characters whose struggles with free will, an illusion they would say, were usually futile against an uncaring world. As Stephen Crane wrote in War is Kind," "A man said to the universe: 'Sir, I exist!' 'However,' replied the universe, 'That fact has not created in me a sense of obligation'."