The Three Different Ages in The Road Not TakenWilliam George, in "Frost's 'The Road Not Taken'", describes the way Frost describes three different ages ages of the poem's narrator. These three different speakers all have a decision to make, and they approach it in different ways. The middle-aged self is the more objective speaker and mocks the younger and older selves as "they are given to emotions, self-deception, and self-satisfaction" (230). While the middle-aged self is able to maintain its objectivity, the younger and older selves are led to delusion and fail to maintain any objectivity. The first part of the article describes the relationship between the middle-aged self and the younger self. The younger self must make a decision about which path to take. While the middle-aged self “points out the similarity of the two paths,” the younger self lies to itself because it is “too dismayed or too 'displeased' by the nature of the choice to notice that 'in passing by / he had worn [the two roads] really much the same, / And both that morning lay equally / In the black leaves no step had trodden'” (230). The younger self pretends that a path, the one it will take, is different, 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 to tell the truth about his past. “In this 'age' of the person, 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 come to know about that first choice: that "both [roads] lay equally that morning." Only self-aggrandizing self-deception could cause the older self to ignore what the middle-aged self clearly knows” (231).