I'm pretty sure this short-story by E.M. Forster is complex enough that it could bear a number of interpretations. One of them would have a religious connotation, that the road is life, the hedge the barrier between life and death, and the moat people a kind of transition space between this life and the next.

I think, however, that Forster is more concerned with this life than the next and that the story is more probably about the failure of man to stop and appreciate the beauty of life in his constant pursuit of the material. What seems to matter to our narrator are the things he carries, the things he has accumulated. He leaves his brother behind him, and his reason for being left behind is telling of who our narrator is:

“At first I thought I was going to be like my brother, whom I had had to leave by the roadside a year or two round the corner. He had wasted his breath on singing, and his strength on helping others. And I had already dropped several things - indeed, the road behind was strewn with the things we all had dropped, and the white dust was settling down on them, so that already they looked no better than stones.”

It is no mistake that the road is circuitous. These people are traveling in circles and getting nowhere. They have lost their true purpose in trying to navigate the road itself and fail to see that losing one another might be more important than losing the things they are carrying with them. What they have really lost is the valuable intangibles to the merely material.

“For we of the road do not admit in conversation that there is another side at all.” Why? Because to admit it exists is to recognize that the progress on the road is worthless, is going nowhere.

I think this is the kind of story that requires re-reading to fully appreciate. At first reading it might seem simple, on a second look, it is anything but.
( )

A heavily allegorical short story. ( )

I definitely prefer Forster's novels to his shorter pieces, which lack depth and with the exception of the Machine Stops, do not have fresh and original plots. Its all very earnest writing-class. Both the Other Side of the Hedge and the Celestial Omnibus seemed to have been written by someone greatly influenced by all things metaphysical, such as was beloved by the Victorians. They are enjoyable novellas and short stories but not the sort that would be considered classics without the author having written some much more major works. ( )