An Analysis of Conflicts Faced by Oliver Twist as the main character of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist

ABSTRACT

Literature is a work of art as an imaginative writing to express the idea, feeling, thought, emotion and experience. The basic aim of literature is to give the pleasure, entertainment and information to readers. One form of literary works is novel. By reading novel, we can find the explanation of the human behavior, personality, conflict etc.

As we know that, there are many aspects of the novel that can be analyzed,
for instance: theme, setting, character, plot and so on. However, in this study the researcher tries to analyze conflicts as one of intrinsic elements. This study focuses on conflicts that are faced by Oliver Twist as the main character Oliver Twist. There are two aspects that become the major of this study; they are: (1) the conflicts that are faced by Oliver Twist, (2) the way of Oliver Twist to overcome his conflict.

Actually, conflict is a very important element in literary works. Without conflict, it will be uninteresting and lifelikeness. Because it is an aspect to develop plot to make the story more valuable and interesting.

This study uses structural approach as the research design. She uses the structural approach because she analyzed one of the intrinsic elements of novel. Therefore, she would like to interpret, evaluate and describe conflict in this novel. The step how she obtained and collected all the data are; (1) finding the book as the source of data that is a novel of Oliver Twist written by Charles Dickens, (2) reading the novel repeatedly to make it easy to understand the content of novel,
(3) analyzing the conflict that found in the novel.

The result of this study shows that Oliver Twist written by Charles Dickens consists of several conflicts especially that are faced by Oliver Twist. There are two kinds of conflict, internal and external conflicts. Besides, those conflicts can be in many forms such as psychological and emotional conflict that is concluded in internal conflict, and social conflict that is concluded in external conflict. Psychological conflict is a conflict, which is related to the mental of the main character. Emotional conflict is a conflict that presence in the subconscious of different and opposing emotions of the character. Social conflict is a conflict which is related to social condition in society.

Finally, by analyzing this novel, the researcher and readers are expected to know how conflicts arise out and how to solve it. Moreover, this study can lead the next researcher to conduct research on conflicts in the other forms of literature
such as drama and poetry in the purpose of enriching and boarding the knowledge in analyzing literary work.