Monday, April 16, 2012

The Cross of Conflict

The screech of tyres, the clatter of breaking glass, the grating of raucous voices, all draw our attention to one of the basic elements of life: Conflict.
Although in Utopian visions conflict is eradicated, no story is complete without conflict. It develops characters, creates suspense and tension, and is the basic problem at the centre of every plot.
When a character comes into contact with something in the story that prevents him from doing something, being something, or simply continuing to exist, there is a conflict. Conflicts change the characters in the story by forcing them to analyse and often change their views, behaviour, or personality. Conflicts, however, are not always intense or even antagonistic. Many times they arise simply because two people cannot agree, or because one cannot understand the other.
There are usually many conflicts in a story between all of the different characters, but there is always one major conflict which is at the centre of the plot and which drives it on to the climax. This was called the agon by the ancient Greeks and is used in the word protagonist, which means ‘first fighter’. This central conflict must be between the protagonist and the antagonist...and the antagonist must start out stronger.
This last idea is the key to dramatic literature because a desperate battle against a greater foe creates excitement and suspense. If it were easy for the hero to triumph there would be no doubt about the conclusion and no suspense. There is also a strange fact about human nature and that is that we tend to sympathise with the under-dog—no matter who is coming out on top, we want the other chap to win.
For every conflict there must be a resolution. At the end of the story the audience must know that the conflict is over and that everyone is happy—or at least that the main character is. In modern literature the resolution of conflict does not tend to take as high a place and sometimes is not included at all in a story. The author chooses to leave his audience ‘hanging’, omitting to tell how the conflict will be resolved or even implying that it never will be. However artistic this approach may be it tends to make the story frustrating and depressing because the hero cannot defeat what he is fighting against.

The different types of conflicts can be divided into three basic groups: man vs. man, or an equal force; man vs. a greater and generally impersonal force; and man vs. himself.

Group 1:

Man vs. Man
This is the sort of conflict used most often in fiction. It is one person fighting against or crossing another. It is a highly personal conflict because although the two people may represent concepts or ideologies, they are embodied—that means that they are real people with personalities and goals. For instance, in Charles Dickens's novel, Nicholas Nickleby, the hero, Nicholas, fights against a hard and unfeeling world in general, which is embodied personally in his wicked uncle Ralph who is the villain of the story. By creating Ralph Nickleby and giving him the same vices and short-comings that Nicholas sees in the surrounding world, Dickens turns the ideas that Nicholas is struggling with into a man with human passions and human weaknesses. Nicholas and his uncle represent the two conflicting sides in the novel—themes such as youth, innocence, high ideals, and kindness to weaker parties on the one hand; and vice, greed, and opportunism on the other. That is the advantage of the man vs. man conflict—it is the clash of two, generally fairly equal, embodied and personal forces.
The most common man vs. man conflict is that between the protagonist and the antagonist, but another common one is man vs. woman. This last type of conflict does not necessarily involve antipathy: it simply portrays the traditional tension between the two sexes, which unfortunately will never really understand each other.
The man vs. man conflict is often used multiple times in a story as it is a versatile type. It is often used without malice between the characters—they simply have different goals or, in some instances, the same goal and cross each other. Sometimes their malice is of a passive sort. Man vs. man is really the most-used conflict of all and, if you doubt, try counting the number of times it is used in its many variants in any generic novel.

Group 2: Man vs. A Greater Force

Man vs. Physical Force
Sometimes an author does not want the conflict in his story to be personal. He pits his character against a force, but one that does not have feelings and emotions. The following list contains several examples of these types of forces.
· Man vs. Nature
· Man vs. State
· Man vs. Machine
· Man vs. Crime
· Man vs. Supernatural
These forces are impersonal but are still usually embodied in some form. For instance, Nature is often embodied in a physical feature such as a mountain, the sea, or the elements; a state can be embodied in its laws and police force; crime is usually embodied in burglars and murderers. With most of these conflicts the protagonist may change but the opposing force usually stays impassively the same. Likewise, the outcome—who comes out on top—probably is very important to the protagonist but is a matter of little concern to the second party.
In Ernest Hemingway’s story The Old Man and the Sea, for instance, Nature is embodied in the ocean, a giant marlin, and ravenous sharks. It is for the most part an impersonal conflict—the old man has much to either gain or lose by the outcome, but the sea, although it plays a predominate role, has nothing to gain or lose and even if it did would not really care.
With many man vs. physical force conflicts, barring the state, crime, and the supernatural, the antagonist is an amoral force, or a force that is neither good nor evil. The protagonist is usually forced into conflict with the force in order to gain something, to prove himself, or simply to survive, but there is no right or wrong involved. With forces such as the state or crime, there can be a moral battle involved, but not necessarily so—the protagonist may be battling crime simply because that is his job and not inevitably because he thinks crime is wrong.

Man vs. Idea
In some conflicts the antagonist is not embodied in any way but is simply a metaphysical entity. In every one of these types the relationship between protagonist and antagonist is impersonal.
· Man vs. ‘The World’
· Man vs. Society
· Man vs. Technology
· Man vs. a world view
These are definite forces that impel men but they are unseen and difficult to define. In Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel Cervantes, the protagonist, Don Quixote, fights a host of adversaries (most notably windmills) but what he is really fighting is the world in general because it functions according to a different system than his own—a system which he is unable to understand.
Man vs. idea conflicts usually involve either a good or an evil force, and it is usually on a moral ground that the protagonist comes to blows with it. Because of this moral element, the resolution of this type of conflict makes the story either optimistic or pessimistic. The protagonist, whether in the right or the wrong, claims the audience’s sympathy and his eventual triumph or defeat has the potential to either cheer or depress them.

Man vs. God/Fate
There is yet a third type of conflict that falls under this heading and although it could be included in either of the two subheadings already discussed, we chose to list it separately. There are two sides to this type.
· Man vs. Inevitable
· Man vs. his Creator
The first could be defined as free will vs. fate, an enigma that has puzzled minds from Shakespeare to Calvin. Can a man defy ‘what is meant to be’? Or is his future unalterably demarcated by fate from the beginning of time?
The second is a personal, usually conscious, struggle between a man and God. Here is yet another enigma—can a man frustrate the purposes of an omnipotent Being? Perhaps as a result, this is a rare conflict to find in literature, although a notable example of it is found in Francis Thompson’s poem, 'The Hound of Heaven.' Because this type of conflict takes place inside a man’s soul rather than in his surroundings, it is intensely personal—second only to the man vs. himself conflict in that respect.

Man caught in the middle
In the complicated web of conflicts, where the protagonist is at cross-purposes with multiple other characters and those characters in turn at odds with each other, the protagonist is sometimes caught between two opposing forces. This three-sided ‘man in the middle’ conflict often comes about through no fault of the protagonist’s and he is usually powerless to resolve it, although he must suffer under the consequences of the conflict. The conflict could be between forces far greater than the protagonist, such as two opposing sides in a war; or between two relatively small forces, such as two other characters in the story who each wants the protagonist to join him in berating the other.

Group 3:
Man vs. Himself
The expression, ‘I have to live with myself’ is almost pedantic in its overuse, but it is a legitimate truth and it comes directly from the man vs. himself conflict. Each one of us does have to live with himself and that is why we are so afraid of disappointing ourselves. We cling desperately to a sort of identity, fearing to discover that we are really somebody else. Perhaps it is the integral quality of this conflict that makes it so often-used in literature.
In almost every story the hero is different at the end from what he was at the beginning. He has learned something. This change usually happens in consequence of an inner conflict. The other conflicts in the story serve to show the protagonist what is lacking in his own character.
In a man vs. himself conflict the character must conquer something within himself that is controlling his actions—such as fear, bitterness, guilt, or an inferiority complex. It is basically the stronger side vs. the weaker side or, alternatively, the good side vs. the bad side of a man’s character.
Because in every man vs. himself conflict the struggle is an inner one, it is fought by the character himself and by him alone. No one else can fight it for him. It is also a conflict that he cannot escape or run away from.
In stories where the protagonist is in conflict with an amoral force he is usually in a battle—whether of survival or simply to prove himself—against some sort of weakness or defect in his character that results in an inability to accomplish something. This could be anything from fear of water to a physical handicap. The protagonist is forced to go beyond himself somehow and discover what kind of moral fibre he is really made of—how much ‘grit’ he possesses.
The character Andy Stevens from Alistair MacLean’s novel, The Guns of Navarone, battles with Fear—fear of heights, fear of the unknown, and most strongly the fear of failure. He tries various means of freeing himself from these fears but inevitably the conflict cannot be resolved until he has passed from his former self into a new person. This type of conflict essentially focuses inward on the protagonist and at the end of the story he usually knows more about himself and his limitations than he did at the beginning.
When the story involves a moral force, however, the battle within the protagonist goes far deeper. The man vs. himself conflict centred around a moral dilemma is illustrated powerfully in Fyodor Dostoevski’s novel, Crime and Punishment, in which a young student struggles to determine the answer to whether or not a thousand rights can absolve a single wrong. Throughout the story he is tortured by his uncertainty as to whether he is a high-principled sophist, or a ruthless murderer.
Instead of discovering the limits of his endurance, in this type of man vs. himself conflict the protagonist must discover what it is he really believes and how far he believes it. It is an introspective study but it also turns the protagonist’s focus outward on the world around him as he balances his ideas and beliefs with truth and reality. It is a battle that each one of us faces as we choose between what is true and what is false. It is essentially the protagonist’s discovery of who he really is.

In all these different ways conflicts serve as catalysts to set the events of the story moving and to keep them moving. Conflicts are an indispensable part of literature just as they are an integral part of life.
-A.P.

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