For my Choose Your Own Adventure analysis, I chose Edward Packard’s divergent story, The Forbidden Castle. The tale begins as I, the reader and main participant in the narrative, find myself behind a tree in Medieval England after wandering into the Cave of Time! After overhearing two passing knights discuss what they call the “Forbidden Castle,” I am faced with my first choice: should I remain hidden and wait for the next passerby? Or should I step out from my hiding place and confront the two knights? It is from this choice that a multitude of end results are stemmed.

In Choose Your Own Adventure books (CYOA), the choices I make affect how my story will eventually end. It is within these stories that my decisions truly do have consequences. The narrative is written in the rare second person. This gives me, the reader, the conception that my choices should be based on those I would actually make in that given situation. If I don’t like the ending I am dealt, however, I may re-trace my choices and experience what would otherwise have occurred had I made a different choice. The Forbidden Castle contained twenty-seven possible endings, which ranged from being burnt at the stake, becoming a gypsy, and getting struck by lightning. Each scenario is completely dependent upon how I have selected my tactics.

While reading Packard’s The Forbidden Castle, I mapped out the choices I was given, as well as the ending to which I was led as a direct constituent of those choices. In a few instances, I found myself in the same scenario I was in during a previous choice. In Marie-Laure Ryan’s Avatars of Story, she discusses her theory of Interactive Architectures and how they affect a story. Ryan posits that when it comes to Choose Your Own Adventure Stories, the “Tree” architecture is the best example of a diagram that “represent[s] multiple variants on the level of story” (Ryan 105). The Tree diagram is indeed a good representation of multiple outcomes, yet it is not the only one that can represent variations within a narrative. When combined, the Maze and Tree diagrams postulated by Marie-Laure Ryan are sufficiently representative of plot diversification within Packard’s The Forbidden Castle.

After being exposed to a swarm of choices and twenty-seven different endings, I have come to the conclusion that choosing my own adventure, though fun and different at times, is simply not for me. Overall, I prefer picking up a book and reading it through until the ending—the one ending—that the author intended for me to read and interpret as part of the text as a whole.