Internal conflict and the essence of character

This is an addendum to my last post on discovery and decision. As I read on in Janet Burroway's book Writing Fiction - yes, I personally drive the consumer market for books on writing - I came to a passage where she crystallized the idea of character (or dramatic character anyhow). She refers to "conflict that is the essence of character".

I was once warned away from thinking of stories in terms of the classic term conflict, because the word suggested something negative. But within the context of viewing stories as a cycles of discovery and decision, conflict seems apt because every decision involves conflicting choices. Otherwise, we are left with a bland tale indeed.

At the macro level, the antipodal positions of conflict have been used to categorize fiction: man vs. man; man vs. nature; man vs. self. (The best stories, of course, resolve back to the latter of the three, even it outwardly they present some version of the first two.)

At an even more abstract level the complication-resolution model also implies conflict. A complication introduces an imbalance in a character's life that can only be resolved - barring an act of God - by action on the part of the character, even if this action is completely internal, such as coming to peace with a situation.

The pitfall with using "conflict" in conceptualizing stories, as my teachers warned, is that the word connotes "aggression." Would could take this to mean "angry" or "violent," adjectives that apply to a limited number of characters.

In short, internal conflict seems like a good way to describe a state of mind of a post-discovery character who must make a decision - be it a decision that resolves a story's main complication or a decision that solves some minor disturbance. How the character acts at the moment of conflict tells us about her soul.