Protagonist meets adversity/antagonist. Protagonist is victorious, or (s)he fails, teaching us a lesson about life.

> Protagonist meets diversity/antagonist.
> Protagonist is victorious, or (s)he fails,
> teaching us a lesson about life.

That formula is not universal, though. (I assume you mean adversity, not diversity.)

For example, read the Ray Bradbury story "There Will Come Soft Rains." Only by twisting that formula to fit this story can you say the story fits the formula.

(Incidentally, this story shows that even a great writer like Bradbury can make dumb mistakes. There is no reason whatsoever for the talking house to tell the occupants what city they live in. That's in there solely to tell the readers.)

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Protagonist meets diversity/antagonist. Protagonist is victorious, or (s)he fails, teaching us a lesson about life.

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What you are describing, more or less, is the basic outline for stories. It's the basic one they teach - yes teach - in language arts and English classes from grade 1 on up.

protagonist begins story...enter conflic...climax...resolution

The four parts of the story.

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(I assume you mean adversity, not diversity.)

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Anyway, what makes a story a story? Not every text string is a story, not even every string of narrative text is a story (as anyone that has web-saavy older relatives comes to know). A story is the particular relation among the narrated events that are defined in terms of both immediate and ultimate causality.

The end of a story is the ultimate cause of the beginning, which is the immediate cause of additional events which lead up to being the immediate cause of the end. Because of this causal structure, we usually see stories that move between two points in time, from past to future, but this is not always the case.

The possibility that the house might be destroyed by fire while nobody was tending things was the cause of a house that tried to look after itself even when there was no point in doing so. And it does teach us a lesson about life, though I don't know that the lesson of a story must be about life as such.

So you see, you are essentially asking if there is a way for a story to not be a story. Can X = ~X ? I'll leave that for you to answer...or perhaps I'll rephrase the question. Do you want to write a story or not? Plenty of room for writers that write texts that are not stories, after all. But I think that there is also plenty of room for writers to write new stories.

I'm talking about a story that doesn't fit the formula. A story with no protagonist or antagonist.

This is an idea that has been in my head for a while:

Two gunslingers vie for power in the old west. Neither is portrayed as the protagonist or antagonist. There is no good guy, there is no bad guy. They fight, they both lose, and no lessons are learned.

<Is it really a deviation from the formula?>
Not really.

<Or is it simply that the protagonist is the both of them and the antagonist is human nature?>
Could be.

<Is the town in which they vie the protagonist, and their fighting the antagonist?>
Maybe.

What if you did have one a protagonist and the other a antagonist? Would the hero march in town and proclaim, 'I am the protagonist!'?

Oftentimes both in and out of fiction a person believes they are in the right where thier enemy is in the wrong, while thier enemy (if a person and not an unknowing force) may believe the opposite.

Just write the story, and let your readers decide who the protagonist and antagonist were, or if there where any.

Once a few people (not here) read a story, and did not like how the viewpoint character went through a right a passage by provoking a battle with sentient creatures, and then killing them. I guess some assume that a viewpoint character is automatically a protagonist. In the end, the characters action's should be the judge.

[This message has been edited by ChrisOwens (edited December 18, 2004).]

But there's a worse problem. To truly eliminate the "protagonist" and "antagonist" is to remove "the entity the audience cares about" and "the entity opposing the protagonist".

And what you end up with is a story in which the audience doesn't care about any entity in the story (because that would be, by definition, a protagonist), and there is no reason to be concered because there is no opposition in the story, and thus no tension anyway.

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You can try to balance the two characters perfectly, but all you end up with is two intertwined stories. Gunslinger A is protagonist in one and antagonist in the other, and Gunslinger B is antagonist in one and protagonist in the other.

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Ah, but only if you show it from one or another personality. What if every scene that has A in it, B is in it also. Of course you can't have every scene this way, so naturally there would be several scenes of other characters talking about A and B.

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As for lessons learned, whether you mean it or not, people will see a theme in a story in which two people shoot it out and end up killing each other.

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Or how about this: the final scene ends with both gunslingers drawing and shooting, and the reader never knows who won. How can there be the "fighting will just get everyone killed" lesson if you don't know if everyone gets killed. It even cuts off another standard plot point: resolution (that in itself has been done before, yes. Even in a western: Shane.)

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It's been done.

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I love it when people do this and show no examples of it whatsoever.

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But there's a worse problem. To truly eliminate the "protagonist" and "antagonist" is to remove "the entity the audience cares about" and "the entity opposing the protagonist".

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So are you saying that the audience cares about Hitler while reading his biography? Well, perhaps they do and don't know it. So why would people care about the story, if there's no one in it for them to care about? maybe they care about the conflict.

I enjoy watching the Spy v. Spy shorts on MadTV. I don't care about one spy or the other, I just care about the conflict. Wether or not one can stretch that out to a full length story is anyone's guess, but I can tell you this: MadTV has been on the air for almost ten years, and I still love Spy v. Spy.

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Every story should have an entity that interests the audience, something at stake which the audience will find important.

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The audience doesn't have to feel as if anything is at stake. They just have to find something interesting.

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Not every story has this, it is the object of good storytelling to find or even create the protagonist of the story.

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Unfortunately, Hitler was not a fictional character.

But I agree with what your saying. Saurman, Gollum are antagonists, but we watch them with grim fasination.

Note that there is a difference between caring for Hitler and caring about Hitler.

The reason I don't give any examples is twofold. First, there are too many examples of this sort of intentionally plotless story already, second you will never have heard of the vast majority of them, as most of them don't get published. Those that are published tend to be limited university press publications, and are published mainly on the strength of the author's tenure.

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So are you saying that the audience cares about Hitler while reading his biography?

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Some of them might.

FYI – before you read further, please understand that when I say point-of-view I mean opinion and personal outlook, not 1st person, 3rd person, etc.

First, I agree with Survivor on the definition of protag and antag as he presented it. Using that as a springboard, then in the case of Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Knopf, we need to recognize that he was the author and the point-of-view discussed in the book was his.
He wrote it fully expecting his audience to believe him to be the "entity they cared about". From his point-of-view he was the protag and the world was the antag. In his state of mind, he expected everyone to agree with that.
The fact that the majority of the populace did not share his opinion was his ultimate downfall. To him, from his point-of-view, he was right. We (the non-Nazi world) really were the antag of his story.
In our story, he was our antag.

A fiction example of the same senerio -
In A Clockwork Orange, Alex (the POV character) believed himself to be the "entity the reader cares about", the world was the "entity opposing him".

In the world of the story, a representative of the world (the docs that experimented on him) considered themselves to be the "entity the people in that world cared about". Alex was, to the docs, "the entity that opposed them", or at least the general good.
It could have been a totally different story if told from the POV of the docs.

Still, none of this discounts the fact that Survivor stated.
Regardless of any of this discussion (on what and who is the protag and antag) the actual story is the conflict between the two entities. Without conflict you just have words, maybe some interesting characters (that are not interacting) and maybe some static scenes, but not a story.

Thanks for bringing the topic up though, I enjoyed taking a closer look at the topic.

Please. Don't talk to each other or refer to each other any more.

That's what I want to do with the gunslingers. The reason every western has a good guy and bad guy (and sometimes an ugly guy) is because one of the two opposing gunslingers did something bad or wrong, and the other guy is trying to punish him/stop him from doing more bad.