Definitely, the most frequent internal conflict we confront in books is man vs. self, which always reflects the contradiction of the inner thoughts of the main character. These conflicts generally show up due to a time when the main character has to make a critical decision. In this kind of situations, the choices have both pros and cons, which make choosing the right decision harder. In Day of The Assassins, even though it is not the major one, this conflict can be seen between Jack Christie and himself because of the choice he has to make in the climax. He can either stop the assassins or let them assassinate Frank Ferdinand. If Jack stops the assassination, he can prevent the World War I, which is a good thing, but the bad thing is it endangers the existence of Jack, his best friend. Also it is not certain whether the new future after 1914 will be good or not. On the other hand, if he let the assassination happen, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand will be dead and the World War I will happen, but the existence of Jack, his best friend and his dad will be safe. Those two possibilities Jack considers reflects Jack’s conflict with himself. He both doesn’t want to change the alignment of events in time and wants to prevent one of the most devastating events happened in the world. But guess what? Only one of these possibilities will happen.
|
The other book that has the same conflict is The Catcher in The Rye. It is about a boy named Holden who is kicked out of school but instead of facing with his parents, he prefers to live his life as he wants and even attempts to pack up and run away. The “man vs. self” conflict can be considered as the major conflict in this book, since the whole book is about the psychological circumstances of Holden, and the protagonist and antagonist ideas in the book are two ideas from one man. The contradiction in Holden’s mind that makes Holden against himself is the alternations between seeing adulthood as “phony”, wanting to live like he is in childhood, and willing to experience the joy you get along with adulthood, more specifically, experience the sexual addiction.
Even though there isn’t any current situation exhibiting the same conflict, as one of the characters, Shado from Arrow, which is a TV series said: “We all have demons.” Even today, many people have hesitations about making a choice. Many films or series we watch gives the same conflict and the same message as Shado said. Like in “Spider-Man 3”, the symbiotic organism that later turned out to be the power source of Venom, who is the underlying major antagonist of the film, was made of the nasty and evil thoughts of Peter Parker. Also Bruce Banner in “The Hulk” has a disease which made two different personalities in Banner’s brain. Those two personalities always try to outrival each other, which determine how the reaction of Bruce is going to be. He can either turn into a green, huge, angry life form or a calm, typical human being. As a result, even though there is not a tangible situation for this kind of conflict, but the number of abstract situations that exhibit this conflict is too high to count.
|