The English Concentration 
in the Liberal Studies Degree 

The following are two versions of the Summary portion of the Summary-Response Essay, along with sample thesis statements for the Response portion; one version is good (“C”) and one very strong (“A”).  In addition, to the summary, you need to complete the response portion, add a title, introduction, and conclusion.

William George, in “Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken,’” describes the way in which Frost depicts three different ages of the narrator of the poem.  These three different speakers all have to make a decision, and they face it in different ways.  The middle-aged self is the most objective speaker, and he mocks the younger and older selves as they “are given to emotion, self-deception, and self-congratulation” (230).  While the middle-aged self is able to maintain his objectivity, the younger and older selves are given to delusion and cannot maintain any objectivity.

The first part of the article describes the relation between the middle-aged self and the younger self.  The younger self must make a decision about which path he will take.  While the middle-aged self “stresses the similarity of the two roads,” the younger self lies to himself because he is “too dismayed with or too ‘sorry’ about the nature of choice to notice that ‘passing there / Had worn [the two roads] really about the same, / And both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black’” (230). The younger self pretends that one path, the path he is going to take, is different, that it is less traveled.

The second part of the article describes the relation between the middle-aged self and the older self.  The older self must make a decision about whether or not he will tell the truth about his past. “In this ‘age’ of the persona, the choice will be either to tell the truth or to lie about the choice made ‘ages and ages’ before. . . . [But] the older self ignores what the middle-aged self had come to know about that first choice: that ‘both [roads] that morning equally lay.’ Only self-aggrandizing self-deception could cause the older self to ignore what the middle-aged self clearly knows” (231).  The older self, like the younger self, accepts the lie that the road was different, a lie which the middle-aged self mocks.

I agree with William George’s analysis of Frost’s poem because it accurately depicts the different time frames existing in the poem and the relationship between these different times. [Note that this is only the thesis for the response;  you would need to add 2-3 paragraphs of support.]
 

 George’s analysis is broken into two parts;  the first part is an analysis of the relationship between the middle-aged self and the younger self, while the second part is an analysis of the relationship between the middle-aged self and the older self.  In the first part of the article, George suggests that the younger self is faced with choosing between two roads, paths that the middle-aged self understands are very similar; the younger self, however, refuses to accept their equal value and instead deludes himself with the idea of having chosen a less traveled path (230-31).  In the second part of the article, George describes how the older self is faced with choosing between telling the truth about his decision as a youth or lying about it;  while the middle-aged self fully recognizes that the choice of the past was not grand, the older self chooses to cover over this truth through deception and self-aggrandizement (231). 

While George’s analysis of Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” accurately captures the existence of three ages of the persona within the poem, the article includes several contradictions in the analysis regarding the time frame existing in the poem. [Note that this is only the thesis for the response;  you would need to add 2-3 paragraphs of support.]