A term you'll meet in narrative structure.
Conflict is the engine of narrative. Every story is, at some level, the story of a protagonist trying to do or get something and being opposed. The classical taxonomy of conflict — sometimes credited to Arthur Quiller-Couch, sometimes to high school textbooks of indeterminate origin — divides conflicts into five (occasionally six or seven) basic types. The categories are not mutually exclusive; most serious literature combines several.
The most direct form: the protagonist is opposed by another individual character. Hamlet vs. Claudius. Sherlock Holmes vs. Moriarty. Beatrice vs. Benedick. Most plot-driven fiction — thrillers, detective stories, much of comedy — runs on this type of conflict.
The trap with person-vs-person stories is moral simplification: making the antagonist evil enough that the protagonist's victory becomes morally easy. The most sophisticated person-vs-person stories give the antagonist real claims (Othello's Iago, Le Carré's Karla, Milton's Satan).
The protagonist is divided against themselves. The conflict is internal — an addiction, a moral choice, a divided identity, a depression. Examples:
Modernist fiction is mostly person-vs-self. The interior turn of literary modernism — Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner — moved the main action from the external world to the inside of a consciousness.
The antagonist is a non-human, non-moral force — the sea, the mountain, the storm, the wilderness, an animal. The conflict is meaningful precisely because nature is indifferent. Examples:
Person-vs-nature stories often double as person-vs-self stories: the external opponent's indifference makes the protagonist's interior crisis visible.
The opponent is the social order — the institution, the state, the community, the dominant ideology. Examples:
Person-vs-society stories are usually political in some form. Their protagonists often lose; the genre survives on its argument about what defeat by a corrupt system looks like.
The opponent is a transcendent force — divine intention, fate, a prophecy, the curse on a family. Examples:
This category overlaps with person-vs-society in many cultures where the divine and the social are indistinguishable.
Modern taxonomies sometimes add:
These often function as variants of nature or fate.
Almost no serious novel uses only one type of conflict. Hamlet is person-vs-person (Claudius), person-vs-self (indecision), and person-vs-fate (the ghost). 1984 is person-vs-society and person-vs-self (O'Brien's interrogation produces both at once). The classification is useful not as a sorting exercise but as a way of seeing which kinds of opposition are layered into a work.
The deepest distinction is between internal conflict (person-vs-self) and external conflict (everything else). The modern novel's signature move has been to make external conflicts also do internal work — the protagonist's external opponent reveals something about the protagonist's interior. A story in which the external conflict is fully external — a chase, a duel, a war — feels less "literary" to contemporary taste; the internal dimension is what serious modern reviewers look for.
When tracking a narrative, ask: what is the protagonist opposed by, and at how many levels? The richest stories combine three or four types. A book that uses only one is either deliberately stripped-down (Hemingway) or thin.
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