Presenting Internal Conflict In Literature
- Melchior Antoine
- Jul 7
- 7 min read
Updated: Sep 10
Internal conflict often makes up the most interesting aspect of the more memorable characters in literature. What exactly is it? Internal conflict in literature is a struggle within a character, which may involve the difficulty or inability to reconcile opposing desires, emotions, or beliefs. It can take the form of a crisis of identity, morality, or belief.
Let’s take the example of Lady Macbeth from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. At the beginning of the play, she seems absolutely resolute and even enthusiastic about killing King Duncan in his sleep in order to help her husband secure the Scottish throne. However, her enthusiasm and hyperbolic language mask her internal conflict.
She is at heart a decent individual who is fully aware of the morally repugnant nature of the deed that she is committing. We see a glimpse of her hesitancy and morality when she says in Act 1, Scene 7 during a soliloquy:
I laid their daggers ready;
He could not miss ‘em. Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I had done’t.
In the quote above, Lady Macbeth is worrying about whether or not Macbeth would miss the daggers she planted in the room to murder King Duncan. In the process, she admits that she doesn’t have the heart to kill Duncan herself because he resembled her father as he slept.
This is a far cry from asking evil spirits to fill her from “the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty,” as she does in Act 1, Scene 5. Lady Macbeth is unfortunately unable to resolve the gap between the evil deed that she aids in committing and her own moral conscience. It drives her insane, and she ends up committing suicide before the play ends.
In this article, I look at three characters from great works of literature and examine how their internal conflict leads to their fatal flaw and tragic downfall. This includes Shakespeare's Othello, Okonkwo from Chinua Achebes' Things Fall Apart, and Anna Karenina from Leo Tolstoy's novel of the same name.
1. Shakespeare's Othello
Othello is another character from a Shakespearean tragedy that exemplifies internal conflict. Unfortunately, we must offer you yet again another example of a Shakespearean character whose story ends in suicide due to irreconciable internal conflict.
Othello, a Moorish general in Venice, has been fooled by his jealous right hand man — Iago — into believing that his innocent wife Desdemona is cheating on him with his officer Cassio. He ends up smothering Desdemona to death in jealousy and rage and quickly regrets after realizing that he has been tricked.
Any character analysis of Othello should focus on his divided or conflicted identity. This can be revealed in his final speech. Here is said speech from Act 5, Scene 2 delivered before Othello ends his own life:
Then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well,
Of one not easily jealous but, being wrought,
Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinable gum. Set you down this,
And say besides that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog
And smote him thus.
I have bolded the most relevant parts of the speech. Othello compares himself in an analogy to “the base Indian,” who throws away a pearl “richer than all his tribe.” The pearl in question is Desdemona. This is a curious thing to say as Othello is a Moor or Black man living in a dominant White society. This reveals to us that he was never at ease in Venetian society.
He is a mercenary hired for his military services by the Venetian state. He has earned honor, status, and wealth in this role. However, he still feels insecure as he is a Moor, one who before was the enemy of the Venetian state, who now fights on behalf of that very same state.
In working for the Venetian state, he now wholly identifies with its values and beliefs and devalues his past life or tribe as less than what he sees as his most prized possession from Venetian societey, his White and Christian wife. His killing of the innocent Desdemona makes him an enemy of the state, leading to the loss of his hard-won and cherished identity as a trusted protector of Venice.
His crime provides Othello with a unique opportunity to dramatize this identity crisis: the irreconcilable inner conflict between his past life as an enemy of the state and his present role as its protector. He casts himself as both “a malignant and . . . turbaned Turk” who “beat a Venetian” and the hand who smote that Turk. These two duelling identities can only be reconciled in death.
2. Internal conflict in Anna Karenina
Our next example is from Leo Tolstoy’s famous novel Anna Karenina (published in 1878). The heroine of the novel, Anna Karenina, is faced with the moral dilemma of choosing between her lover Alexei Vronsky and her husband Alexei Karenin. Tolstoy deliberately gives both men the same first name.
Anna has to make the choice between pursuing a life of her passion and dreams with Vronsky and a life of duty and moral obligation with her husband and son, Seryozha. After choosing to have an affair with Vronsky, she has a strange recurring dream. The dream, more or less, manifests her moral dilemma, internal conflict, and even fatal flaw.
In her recurring dream, she is in possession of both worlds: the passion of pursuing her dream life with Vronsky and remaining with her husband and staying the dutiful wife and mother. Here is a description of said dream:
But in dreams, when she had no control over her thoughts, her position presented itself to her in all its hideous nakedness. One dream haunted her almost every night. She dreamed that both were her husbands at once, that both were lavishing caresses on her. Alexey Alexandrovitch was weeping, kissing her hands, and saying, "How happy we are now!" And Alexey Vronsky was there too, and he too was her husband. And she was marveling that it had once seemed impossible to her, was explaining to them, laughing, that this was ever so much simpler, and that now both of them were happy and contented. But this dream weighed on her like a nightmare, and she awoke from it in terror.
The dream offers us Anna’s unique character perspective and is also full of subtext offering commentary on her fatal flaw as a character. She has to make a choice between her husband and son and her lover Vronsky. The dream reveals Anna’s own sense of self-centeredness and egocentrism.
She refuses to accept the sacrifice of losing her son implied in choosing her lover over her husband. We see this later when her husband Karenin offers her a divorce so that she can go on to marry Vronksy and stop living in scandal. However, she refuses because that would mean breaking ties with her son Seryozha. The dream then can be said to accurately depict her irrational desire to have both worlds.
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3. Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart (published in 1958) recounts the tragedy of its protagonist Okonkwo. Okonkwo is a renowned Igbo warrior from the clan and village of Umuofia, who is haunted by the shameful legacy of his father, whom he sees as weak.
His father is a palm wine drunkard, who loves to play his flute, is constantly in debt, and failed to adequately provide for his family in Okonkwo's childhood. Okonkwo wishes to be nothing like him and works hard to be a success. He becomes a fearful warrior, a skilled wrestler, and a successful yam farmer. More importantly, he is also able to adequately provide for his family unlike his father.
Okonkwo believes that showing tender emotion or compassion is unmanly behavior and takes that idea to the extreme. This is manifested in the sad story of Ikemefuna. Ikemefuna is a young boy from another village who serves as a peace offering to Umuofia because of the wrongdoing of his father. He has been accepted as a hostage to Umuofia after his father kills a woman from Umuofia. Okonkwo is chosen as his guardian, and during that time (a period of three years), Okonkwo grows to love him as a son.
However, the Oracle of Umuofia eventually rules that Ikemefuna has to be killed as a blood sacrifice for his father’s crime. Ikemefuna is led unsuspectingly to the outskirts of the village, with a ceremonial pot of palm wine on his head, by a group of men tasked with the sacrifice, and Okonwko comes along, even when he doesn’t have to.
Okonkwo had been warned by the elders not to participate in the ritual. He ignores the advice and directly kills the boy with his own hands, dealing the final fatal blow:
As the man . . . drew up and raised his machete, Okonkwo looked away. He heard the blow. The pot [of palm wine] fell and broke in the sand. He heard Ikemefuna cry, "My father, they have killed me!" as he ran towards him. Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his machete and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak.
The passage ends in ironic euphemism or understatement, with a sentence as short as "He was afraid of being thought weak" to describe the justification of a choice as awful as a father killing his own son. In short, Okonkwo is inflicted with what we today would call a toxic sense of masculinity, which is driven by the insecurity of being thought weak in the eyes of others due to the legacy of his father. His toxic masculinity is overcompensating for his father's failures. He is traumatized for three days after the killing, unable to sleep or eat.
During that period, he lies to himself, asking "When did you become a shivering old woman . . . How can a man who has killed five men in battle fall to pieces because he has added a boy to their number?” Okonkwo’s internal conflict is based on his inability to reconcile his overcompensation as a strong man and warrior and the human instinct to give in to feelings of compassion and tenderness, which he mistakes for weakness.
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2025, July 07). Presenting Internal Conflict In Literature. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/internal-conflict |
