FUNDAMENTALS OF CONFLICT: COMMON AND UNCOMMON FORMS
As a story mechanic, conflict is easy enough to schematize — character is the noun, conflict the verb, or conflict is war! — but actual conflicts in situ (within a story) are endlessly diverse in type and in expression and in their synergy with their Characters, making them therefore exceptionally difficult to compass comprehensively.
In fact, many of the conflicts in our fictions elude any simplistic definition, including the one I offered up in our previous post: Conflict is a prominent adversity that challenges the characters in a story; Conflict is the obstacle or impediment against which the characters struggle.
(Another Conflict analogy, by way of Frankenstein, just for kicks: Character is the flesh of the story, but Conflict is the lightning that gives that flesh life.)
While it’s true that a Conflict definition is a useful starting point, it is also equally true that in order to grasp this most vital and vitalizing of narrative mechanics, in order to master its galvanic lightning, we must add to our Conflict repertoire.
Here I offer up some common and uncommon Conflict forms (which will inevitably overlap):
CHOICE / AGENCY CONFLICT
This is the standard Conflict form where the character confronts an external obstacle and resolves it through a choice / act of agency (or by not choosing / not being agentic).
PERVASIVE CONFLICT
A conflict that looms Sauron-like over a story and / or over a character’s entire life but which is nevertheless resolved or at least confronted, such as Oscar’s search for love in my own The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao or the Bengali protagonist’s struggle for a home in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Third and Final Continent or Louise’s battle with weight and acceptance in Andre Dubus’ The Fat Girl. Basically, the standard Choice / Agency Conflict stretched out.
AMBIENT CONFLICT
A conflict that pervades the story and the life of its characters and acts as a binding framework, but which itself is often too diffuse, too complex, too hyperobject to grapple with directly, and tends to be addressed only through its subsidiary elements.
Her are three classic examples:
The Immigrant Conflict that suffuses many immigrant narratives. In these newcomer tales the arrivant’s struggle to secure a home for themselves in the new country is the defining conflict that binds disparate stories, characters, and chapters together and yet there is rarely any specific culminating confrontations, just a series of running engagements with this vast experience, clashes that feed back into the Ambient Conflict, sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely. Resolutions are rarely decisive, often ambivalent, and provisional. Oscar Hijuelos’ Our House In the Last World, Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, Edward Rivera’s Family Installments, Gish Jen’s Typical Americans; my own novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao are possible examples.
The Nation Conflict in which the lives and struggles of the characters reflect and subvert the national historical struggle in which these characters are entangled (and vice versa). Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Shame; Chamoiseau’s Texaco; García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude are the ur-examples but there are many novels that take on this approach to varying degrees — see Tash Aw’s work and others.
The Era Conflict, which deals with a particular timespace in a character’s life — for example, sometimes the Conflict is a character’s youth or the years they were in the military — a timespace they are still conflicted about or haunted by long after the fact. This kind of conflict is an essential frame for the bildungsroman, though this can also be approached through Blocking Time, as well. Sandra Cisneros’ story One Holy Night has many beats of a traditional conflict but is also deeply an Era Conflict story. (I’ll say a little more on Era Conflict below.)
Please note: for the sake of insight I’m making a fuzzy distinction between Ambient Conflicts that are too vast and defused to be dealt with directly without lapsing into allegory, and Pervasive Conflicts that are, if not resolved, at least confronted directly, often through personification.
THE HAUNTED RELATIONSHIP CONFLICT
Sometimes the overarching conflict of a story is neither a person nor a society, nor a physical obstacle. Sometimes the conflict is a relationship that haunts / troubles the protagonist character. The Conflict, in other words, is a relationship the protagonist character is conflicted about.
This is different from the regular Relationship Conflict that drives the Romance Genre (among others), a pervasive Conflict that involves a ton of choices and agency and consequences.
The Haunted Relationship Conflict is another animal altogether, identifiable by its lack of decision points or resolution. Sure, one might identify many small obstacles and many small choices in these tales, but the single determinative choice that is common to traditionally structured conflicts will be difficult to ascertain. Same goes for the idea of a resolution / revelation. Resolution and revelation are not usually the “point” of these stories.
A good example of this type of the Haunted Relationship Conflict is Roberto Bolaño’s Clara. Here the narrator recollects (and wrestles with) his messy relationship with the troubled Clara whom he “fell madly in love with” and subsequently lost, and whom he stayed in touch with her whole short life. The conflict is not attaining or losing Clara, but Clara herself as a person — all her ambiguity, her complexity, her difficulty, her humanity, and how she haunts the narrator. Clara, the story, might end — but the narrator doesn't make some defining choice or experience any clarity. Clara’s ultimately unknowable humanity is not something that can be resolved — nor can the narrator’s own conflicting feelings be resolved — but both can be expressed.
(In some ways the Era Conflict is a mirror of the Haunted Relationship Conflict; it takes the Relationship Conflict’s attempt to work through a haunting person / thing and maps it over a particular timespace / epoch.)
And, finally, please remember that Genre also has an enormous impact on how conflicts express in fiction. Marriage strife plays one way among public school teachers in contemporary Washington Heights — and another way entirely among nobility in a fantasy realm where marriage alliances can determine the fate of kingdoms. Now imagine same two conflicts except make the teacher marriage conflict into a grim tragedy, and the fantasy conflict into a light-hearted romp.
Alright, that’s it for now. Up next: more conflict tools.