Conflict is the opposition that drives a narrative forward — the gap between what a character wants and what stands in their way. Without conflict, events merely happen in sequence; with conflict, events become plot.
Traditional classifications identify conflict as person vs. person, person vs. nature, person vs. society, person vs. self, and person vs. fate or the supernatural. These categories are useful as starting points but rarely describe actual stories accurately — most fiction involves multiple, nested conflicts. A character fighting another person may also be fighting their own cowardice and the social conditions that produced the confrontation.
Conflict in literary fiction is often internal, ambiguous, or unresolvable. The conflict may be between competing values the character holds, between what they want and what they need, or between their self-understanding and the reality the reader can see. Stories where the conflict resolves cleanly — the obstacle is overcome, the antagonist is defeated — tend toward genre convention. Stories where the conflict transforms rather than resolves tend toward literary fiction. Neither approach is superior; they serve different purposes.
Conflict generates the pressure under which character is revealed. A character who faces no opposition remains theoretical — the reader knows what they say they value but not what they’ll actually do when their values are tested. This is why scene construction often centers on confrontation: the moment where the character must act, and their action reveals something that exposition alone couldn’t.