CHALLENGER VS. DEFENDER PT.2

Though the terms “challenger and defender” are patterned on the idea of physical conflict, they can be applied to any number of narrative forms, such as those involving a conflict of expectations.

In THE BASE LEVEL OF CONFLICT I observed that Bradbury’s short story “The Last Night of the World” as one that has nearly no conflict in the “X vs. Y” sense. A man and wife, the only characters in the story, become privy to the fact that the world is about to come to an end. Yet instead of their registering emotions of fear or frustration, the couple is totally okay with such a transcendent doom, implicitly because it’s better than the fate of nuclear annihilation. I noted in the essay that because the story focuses on the characters’ mental turnabout rather than on the phenomenon of the world’s death, so that in my current terminology, the world’s doom is the thing that challenges the select couple, and they are defenders not in the sense of rising to the challenge, albeit only in the sense of professing their total acceptance of their fate. Indeed, during my reading of Poe’s complete prose works, I became aware that in some of his vignettes—“Island of the Fay,” “The Oval Portrait”—the viewpoint characters have even less internal conflict. In both vignettes, the “defenders” are just windows into the author’s perspective, as he illustrates how something fair devolves into something foul.

The “conflict of expectations” feeds into a trope I discussed in CHANGING PARTNERS IN THE MONSTER-DEMIHERO DANCE, where I surveyed the use of the focal presence in a number of comic-book horror stories. I remarked that there’s a dominant tendency for the “monster”—what Frank Cioffi calls “the anomaly”—to be the star of the story. “The Gentle Old Man” overtly follows this tendency, while both “Grave Rehearsal” and “Bridal Night” do so in more covert fashion. At the beginning of each story, there’s an evil presence—respectively, Madame Satin and Count Von Roemer— both of whom take the role of “the challenger” and who seem more than able to overpower each of the viewpoint characters, respectively B.S. Fitts and Helena Ayres. But Ayres, though she is a defender, has greater power than Von Roemer and easily defeats him. B.S. Fitts does the same to Madame Satin, though Fitts only gains power after Satin has killed him.

Some defenders are the stars precisely because the evil in their nature calls up some sort of reciprocal evil, and this pattern is seen in both “The Speed Demon” and “Den of Horror.” The evils that doom both defenders fit the role of challengers, but they have a subordinate role, not least because they seem to evolve from the defender’s own nature, not unlike the doppelganger in Poe’s “William Wilson.” At the same time, irony doesn't always imply consubstantiality, for Prince Prospero, despite the way he perishes while defending himself from the Red Death, is not the personified plague's sole victim.