Conflict: there are only four kinds
10 ESSENTIALS OF A DYNAMITE STORY
#3 CONFLICT
For the record, I don’t entirely agree with what I’m going to tell you about conflict. You could say, I suppose, that I’m in conflict with conflict.
It is the common wisdom in literary circles that there are only four types of conflict, that in all the annals of story-telling, from cave paintings to Finding Nemo, every conflict has fallen into one of four categories.
I have issues with the classifications for several reasons, one of them being that there’s often more than one type of conflict going on in any given story. But we won’t chase that rabbit today. As I’ve said here before, you have to know what the rules are before you can earn the right to disregard them. So let’s talk about the basic classifications, which are somewhat self explanatory, and some examples of each.
MAN AGAINST MAN
Into this category fall all those stories where good guy meets bad guy, they duke it out and the hero stands triumphant.
Think Luke Skywalker versus Darth Vader. Frodo versus Gollum. (And it is Frodo versus Gollum, not Frodo versus Sauron. We never SEE Sauron. Well, his eye now and then. But in the end, it is Gollum who fights to the death to prevent Frodo from accomplishing his quest.) In Silence of the Lambs, Special Agent Starling fights Dr. Hannibal Lextor—even though they never touch each other, but when Sara Connors goes up against The Terminator, there is tremendous physical violence. Les Miserables is a classic Man Against Man conflict, pitting Jean Valjean against the police detective Javert. The Fugitive is one, too, for the same reasons.
MAN AGAINST NATURE
In essence, this category encompasses all those stories where man must battle the elements, or some creature spawned by the elements. Three fishy examples of this category are Jaws, Moby Dick and The Old Man and the Sea. In each, man must do battle against a denizen of the deep in a life-and-death struggle. Same is true to some extent of The Life of Pi, in which the boy must battle both the sea and the tiger, and in Robinson Crusoe, where the island itself becomes the adversary. In The Perfect Storm, a ship’s crew battles a massive hurricane.
This is one of the places where I veer to the south of traditional thinking. I’m not so sure nature can be the antagonist in a story because nature has no free will. Nature itself is not bent on a particular man’s destruction. And if you dig into many Man Against Nature stories, you find that nature is the really the catalyst that brings out the true conflict—which is actually Man Against Himself. Yes, Captain Ahab was fighting the white whale. But waaay more important is the battle of pride he fought within himself—and lost. How about The Perfect Storm? Was the crew of the Andrea Gail battling a hurricane or their own pride and greed?
MAN AGAINST SOCIETY
These stories pit the protagonist in a struggle against the ideas, practices or customs of other people. In the children’s classic, Charlotte’s Web, it is Wilbur versus a society that eats pigs. In The Bee Movie, a lone bee takes on mankind’s practice of “stealing” honey. Think 1984. And The Hunger Games, which is both a Man Against Man and a Man Against Society conflict.
MAN AGAINST SELF
This is the conflict in all stories in which man struggles with his own soul, his ideas of right and wrong, his choices. It’s the conflict in A Beautiful Mind, where Dr. John Nash must confront and conquer his mental illness, and in Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde where the two halves of one man actually manifest themselves physically. In Julius Caesar, the protagonist, Brutus, goes to war with himself over his loyalty to his friend and his loyalty to his country. Only one side wins—the Brutus who believes murder is justified in the name of preserving democracy.
As I mentioned above, Man Against Self is often the root conflict in stories that seem to be about other things. For my money, any story is improved when there are layers of conflict—when the protagonist in a Man Against Man story must first conquer his own demons, win in the battle with himself before he takes on the world at large.
Write on! 9e
