“Roads Not Taken” combines two essential features of imaginative literature. There is, on the one hand, the representation of character determining action, or action determining character (Aristotle’s basic criteria). It seems—and this is one of the questions the Connotations editors have been discussing—that especially in modern and postmodern literature the relation becomes increasingly complex in so far as characters are not only defined by what they do but also by what they did not do but might have done, and that, accordingly, their question “who am I?” (or our question: “who are you?”) is not to be answered in a straightforward manner. And there is, on the other hand, the fact that any imaginative or fictional literary representation is a “road not taken” in that it shows us not what is but what might have been, or, in the words of Aristotle: “it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen—what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity” (Poetics section 9). In this respect, the road not taken may be the road we should take, in the author’s view.

At the same time, any decision by a writer about a character, an event, a description, and so on, is a road taken, and all the other options a writer has, the characters that do not appear, the events that do not take place, are roads not taken. Of course all this is only relevant to our theme—and to critical discussion in general—when the very alternative becomes part of the author’s project, i.e. when he or she shows us that the text we read is meant to be a road we have not taken (but might do so), or when the author shows us that there might have been an alternative to what we read, i.e. that the writing process is a road on which the author had to take decisions and reflect on alternatives.

From: Matthias Bauer, “Roads Not Taken”