What are the Major Parts of a Novel?

What else besides the story and the characters create a complete novel?

As you can see the title of this post and the subtitle apparently ask the same thing in different ways. But let's separate the "parts" of a novel from the gestalt of a novel. That odd word, gestalt, is the organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts. Maybe an analogy will help show the difference.

The major parts that go to make up an apple pie are the apples and the crust. But there are also the spices, the ripeness and tartness of the apples, the flakiness of the crust, the effect that cooking has on the ingredients, and even the relative humidity in the atmosphere when the pie is cooked. The pie becomes more than just the sum of its parts.

The plot, the characters, the setting, and the dialogue are among the major parts of a novel. But like the more subtle ingredients and spices in an apple pie, the novel also has an author's writing style, character development, conflict, syntax, word choice, the writer's intent, even the writer's state of mind go into the gestalt, and the whole is much more than the sum of its parts.

Let's first look at Conflict as a building block of Plot...

What does "plot" mean? It means what happens in the novel. But the subtle thing (or maybe the overt thing) in the plot is the conflict, and without conflict there is no story. That is not to say that the conflict has to always be on the scale of a war story. Try as I might I cannot come up with more than three general types of conflict in all stories. Note that when I say "Man" I am referring to the human population of both sexes, but we could also consider any group of entities (aliens on a planet that have no humans) and still have the three types of conflict that go to make up the conflict, the thing that creates the plot.

The three types of conflict:

Man vs. Man
Man vs. Himself
Man vs. Nature

That's it. There are no other types of conflict that can't be covered by these.

Well, actually there's Man vs. Machine, so maybe...but that's just another episode of Battlestar Galactica.

As we examine each one of these types of conflict, we will begin to see that they encompass all conflict that is possible. But remember that there can also be a combination of these types of conflict in a single story and usually does contain more than one type of conflict.

Man vs. Man

Man vs. Man is the conflict of one person with another, one group of people with another, one nation against another nation. Stories of war are Man vs. Man. Stories of two opposing political opponents for the office of the President of the United States are Man vs. Man. Stories of the police fighting a street gang in a big city are Man vs. Man.

Man vs. Himself

Man vs. Himself is the kind of conflict we might see on a more personal level. A kid being bullied in school who can only resolve the bullying by standing up for herself, overcoming her fear and cowardice and weakness of body and fighting ability, agility, or outsmarting her tormentors through a change or development within herself; a substance abuser who can only get his life back on track if he can stop drinking or doing drugs; a woman who is being abused by her husband or boyfriend is at conflict with herself until she has the courage or enough self-esteem to leave the abusive relationship; a gay person struggling with self-acceptance—all these are Man vs. himself conflicts, but we obviously can have a mixture of this conflict with Man vs. Man, because there are the bullies, the gangs, those that condemn the gay or lesbian person, and the domestic abusers that also have to be dealt with. Man vs. himself can also include an amputee learning to function fully as we've seen athletes do.

Man vs. Nature

Man vs. Nature is the kind of conflict where a farmer's crops are wiped out by a flood, people trying to survive in a drought condition, someone climbing Mount Everest. In this last one, it will obviously also include Man vs. himself, reaching deep down for that last ounce of strength and endurance to continue up the face of the mountain.

Still all conflict can be seen as these three types or a combination of them.

Illustrative examples of conflict in plot...

Man vs. Man

I just watched the somewhat older movie (1971) Straw Dogs about a successful writer and his wife who returned to her hometown so that he could get away and devote himself to writing. The wife was a successful actress on a TV series, and the people in her hometown assured her that they had watched every episode. The writer hires a crew of locals to repair the roof on the barn on the wife's property. This was set in a Southern town in Mississippi, and of course the stereotypes abounded. The roofing crew was made up of a former high school football star and his friends. He had dated the wife when they were in high school. In fact, it comes out that he still believes that he should have a claim on her and, as the plot and conflicts develop in the story, the former football star rapes the wife in her home, when the husband is out hunting with the roofing crew. In fact, taking the city boy hunting was a ruse to get the wife alone. The rising action in the movie, of course, was how the small town gang of rednecks were pitted against the writer and his wife. The main conflict therefore was Man vs. Man. But the writer/husband had some Man vs. Himself conflict to take care of in learning to stand up to the redneck gang.

Nonetheless, the major conflict was Man vs. Man. We find this the usual kind of conflict in such stories, as well as in action/adventure, suspense-thriller, war stories, and even sports films.

Man vs. Himself

Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage is one of the best examples of Man vs. Himself. Even though it is set during the American Civil War, which is hyper Man vs. Man conflict, the plot hangs on how the main character, Henry Fleming, faces the eventual prospect of going into battle. He is concerned about his rising fear and wishes he could be like the other men who are apparently fearless and who appear to welcome the coming battles. But Henry is a coward and eventually runs. He must find some way to justify his desertion to himself, and when someone hits him on the head with the butt of a rifle, and he bleeds, he at first parlays that "wound" into his own red badge of courage and eventually weaves a tale of his heroics during battle. But by the end, he has really changed and knows how to convert his fear within himself. There is a great deal of symbolism in the Man vs. Himself aspects of this story; this novel is studied in high school literature classes, as well as in college. Readers of the time thought that Stephen Crane himself had served in the Civil War because the story was so authentic, and yet he hadn't. He had only imagined what it must have been like.

Man vs. Nature

Perhaps one of the most iconic novels of Man vs. Nature, John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, is also one that powerfully renders the other two main types of conflict, Man vs. Himself, and Man vs. Man. The "nature" part of the conflict is of course the great dust bowl days of the 1930s and while it is not the central plot it is the thematic antagonist that set in motion the westward migration of people in the midwest, which centers around the Joad family that packs up and intends to work picking fruit in California. The journey there is where the main elements of the story lies. And so it is with most Man vs. Nature stories. This conflict is a vehicle for humanity and its best and worst to be explored. Unless a Man vs. Nature story is completely mindless, it can act as a powerful vehicle to explore the depths of Man's humanity.

In subsequent posts, I will explore other aspects of plot development, as well as character development, growth of characters, and other elements of what goes into creating a novel.