Person versus the Self

Alison Killick on Hot Little Hands by Abigail Ulman

Australian author Abigail Ulman has written a collection of insightful short fiction that introduces the reader to young women navigating the transition between childhood and maturity. While Ulman uses many narrative techniques to good effect in this collection of short stories, it is her use of conflict to create narrative tension that engages and intrigues.

The type of conflict that Ulman explores in these stories is Person versus the Self. The protagonists struggle with internal conflict — their own prejudices and doubts, character flaws or wounds. In Ulman’s stories, the obstacle of self often prevents the protagonists from getting what they desire. Ulman uses this tension to compel the reader forward into the story to discover if the protagonist is successful, or not.

The Pretty One has a protagonist who desires to be loved by a beautiful young man, but her jealousy and insecurities become obstacles in the relationship. As the story unfolds her insecurities create bigger and bigger obstacles. Will the relationship survive?

So it’s over. But to me, it’s not really. I call him the next day. I tell him that what I’m asking is something really simple, and I’m sure we can work it out.

‘I need baby steps,’ he says.

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means you stress me out, and I need some time away.’

The next day I call him again. I tell him I’m heartbroken and I miss him, and if we can just get back together it’ll be okay.

The victim of her own actions, the protagonist is unable to achieve her desire due to the obstacles she sets in her own path.

An inner conflict Ulman explores in the series is the paradoxical tension of reluctance to leave childhood behind while desperately wanting to fast-forward into the future. This is particularly evident in Jewish History where the protagonist faces the conflict of knowing she will have to shed the security of the known to achieve her desire of fitting in at school.

I stick my thumb through the hole in my jumper and squint into the afternoon sunlight. ‘You know what?’ I say. ‘They’re right. We do dress like Russians.’

‘What?’ she says, although I know she heard me.

‘And we stink.’ I turn to look at her. ‘It’s disgusting. We stink.’

She stands and looks at me for a long moment. Then she takes her drink out of my hand and walks away without a word, leaving me to face it all on my own, and all over again.

To apply Ulman’s focus on internal conflict to my own writing, I would place my characters in pressured situations and expose them to new experiences where their own prejudices and doubts emerge for them to stumble over. Giving my characters inner conflicts rather than just external would enrich them and give them complexity, perhaps enabling the reader to engage with them more fully.

Story-master Michael Hauge suggests that your number one goal in telling a story is always to take your audiences on an emotional journey by finding the conflict in every story you write. The conflict that Ulman uses in her stories is a type of conflict we can all relate to. It does not look to war or violence, but to adeptly captured flawed beings. In her protagonists, readers will recognize echoes of themselves.