Biblio Breakdown: Turtles All the Way Down

Let's do a deep dive into the types of narrative conflict.

In this Biblio Breakdown, we'll examine John Green's Turtles All the Way Down.

If you recognize the name John Green, you should. Aside from Turtles (and a number of other titles), he's the author of The Fault in Our Stars, a book so impactful that even just typing its title gets me misty-eyed. Stars deserves its own Biblio Breakdown at some point, but for now we'll focus on Turtles All the Way Down, Green's 2017 release.

Narrative Conflict Types

There are four narrative conflict types we as writers can choose from for our protagonist to endure throughout the course of our manuscripts. These are:

• character against character

• character against nature

• character against society

• character against self

Ideally, we choose one of these as our protagonist's primary conflict type and sprinkle in the others in our subplots or scenes throughout. The most commonly put to use among these (in my reading experience, anyway) is character against character, wherein our protagonist must overcome the obstacles put in their way by another character.

If you're looking for a visual to drive this home, think of your main character as a ram. Now think of your antagonist as another ram. Now they butt heads.

Repeat ad nauseam for 60,000+ words, and now you have a novel. It's just that easy!

Right.

In any event, character against character is great, and I was certain after the first couple of chapters that Turtles All the Way Down would feature this as its primary narrative conflict type.

After the first five chapters or so, however, it became apparent that the book's true conflict, in my view, was actually character against self, which I believe can be one of the most rewarding paths to pursue as a writer and among the most harrowing to follow as a reader.

Green's choice of character versus self is even more noteworthy because of its depth: Aza's intrusive thoughts and obsessive-compulsive disorder define how she navigates her everyday life, so much so that Aza often employs metaphors to describe her relationship to them.

That's right; her relationship to them. The character versus self conflict is so deep within our protagonist that it actually turns inward on itself as Aza frames it not as a struggle against herself, but rather as if it were a struggle against another third-party entirely.

Granted, one could go on then to frame this as a character-against-nature narrative conflict, and I wouldn't begrudge anyone who chose to do so. I, however, feel as though the conflict reads as a character-versus-self narrative—at least that seems to be how Aza experiences the conflict despite how she might frame it externally.

Further to these points, I feel the "easy" (as if anything in writing is ever easy) thing for Green to have done with this narrative conflict would have been to put to use the throwing off the disability or miracle-cure tropes. Aside from those approaches treading in harmful waters, I'm glad Green didn't go this direction for two reasons:

1. Realism

2. Theme

On Realism

Where the first of these is concerned, the book throughout is set in a world that is, insofar as we can tell, just like our own. In fact, Aza's psychiatrist treats her OCD with medication and what, in my observation, would be something like cognitive behavioral therapy. Simply put: there's no "magic drug" presented as a MacGuffin to help move the plot along, which is great because Aza being "cured" is fundamentally not what the story is about.

One might argue, "Wait, the primary narrative conflict is character against self, and you're trying to tell me the protagonist triumphing in that conflict isn't the story's focus? Seems shaky to me."

And I could understand that argument: yes, there's a reason we call it the primary narrative conflict. It's meant to be the central challenge our main character must confront by the time the book reaches its conclusion. And that's still the case in Turtles—Aza does confront this conflict throughout the novel, but where it may differ from expectations is that we don't get the "neat and tidy" resolution of said conflict that one might expect were the above-mentioned tropes employed.

Realism is key here in that very rarely in real life do things reach an absolutely perfect equilibrium. All things come with a cost of some kind, be it physical, emotional, monetary, etc. It's a rare day in Oz that we can click our heels together three times and wake up back in Kansas, only to discover all of our trials were nothing more than a dream and an allegory about the gold standard.

My point is this: without getting too spoilery, Green's resolution of Aza's primary conflict is well played in that it, like life, achieves its resolution not in a miraculous curing, but rather through a long road of trials that lead her (and those around her) to develop a better framework through which to view these parts of her. That is to say, there is no absolute triumph of good over evil or vice versa, which is where my second point, theme, comes into play.