The Three Different Ages in The Road Not TakenWilliam George, in "Frost's 'The Road Not Taken'", describes how Frost depicts three different ages of the narrator of the poem. These three different stakeholders all have to make a decision, and they deal with it in different ways. The middle-aged self is the more objective speaker, and he mocks younger and older selves because they "are prone to emotion, self-deception, and self-congratulation" ( 230). While the middle-aged self is able to maintain objectivity, the younger and older selves are plagued by delusion and cannot maintain any objectivity. The first part of the article describes the relationship between the middle-aged self and the younger self. The young person himself must make a decision about the path he will take. While the middle-aged self "points out the similarity of the two routes," the younger self lies to itself because it is "too dismayed or too 'sorry' about the nature of the choice to notice that "going through there / had carried [the two roads] really about the same, / And both that morning lay equally / In the leaves, no step had trodden the dark” (230). The younger self pretends that a path, the one it is going to take, is different, that it is less traveled. The second part of the article describes the relationship between the middle-aged self and the older self. The older self must decide whether or not he will tell the truth about his past. “In this “age” of personality, the choice will be either to tell the truth or to lie about the choice made “centuries and centuries” before. . . . [But] the older self ignores what the middle-aged self had learned about that first choice: that “both [roads] that morning were equally open.” Only self-aggrandizing self-deception could cause the older self to ignore what the middle-aged self clearly knows.” (231).