It is Not Easy To Make A Choice In Our Life——An Interpretation of the Poem The Road Not Taken By Robert Frost

Reader-Response Criticism is one of the schools of western literary criticism.The scholars of the school hold the view that literature is a performative art and each reading is a performance,analogous to playing/singing a musical work,enacting a drama,etc.Literature exists only when it is read. They maintain that reading is a transction between the reader and the text,meaning is as dependent upon the reader as it is dependent upon the text.So there is no universal and absolute interpretation of a poem;rather,there can be several probable interpretations.According to their view-point,a literary text possesses no fixed and final meaning and value.Literary meaning and value aretransactional,dialogic,created by the interaction of the reader and the text.In this paper,the writer,with his interpretation of the poem The Road Not Taken by famous American poet Robert Frost,tries to demonstrate that Reader-Response Criticism,in a sense,is reasonable in proving that the reality of the text lies between the reader and the text and in the transaction,it is the readers who bring their world of experience to activate the text.