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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/3310
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

All fiction must have _conflict_, but that conflict certainly doesn't have to spring from the existence of a personified antagonist. There's man-against-nature (e.g., any survival story), man-against-himself (any kind of addiction-recovery story), and even conflicting protagonists (i.e., two characters have incompatible goals and struggle to defeat each other but the reader isn't invited to root for one over the other). Even in traditional man-against-man stories, sometimes the enemy doesn't exist as a character, the protagonist is struggling against the villain's malign influence.

There are even weirder cases. In the Sherlock Holmes short story, “The Man with the Twisted Lip”, there's no antagonist, no villain, and no crime, although I don't think Conan Doyle could have stretched it out for a whole novel without enraging his readers. Arthur C. Clarke’s novel _Rendezvous With Rama_ similarly lacks any kind of negative character (although you could argue it lacks a plot altogether). My wife is reading _Eat, Pray, Love_ -- I bet there's no antagonist there, but I can't be troubled to check.

An interesting example from the movies (it's much easier to talk about movie plots because they are so much simpler and because there are so fewer movies made than novels, most people have seen most popular movies): _The Fifth Element_ has a clear and heroic hero (Dallas) and a clear and villainous villain (Zorg) but the two never meet and are never aware of each others' existence. They are in the same scene, once, but Bruce Willis walks out of frame before Gary Oldman walks in.

Original score: 9