You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables. Any force in a story that is in conflict with the protagonist. An antagonis may be another person, an aspect of the physical or social environment, or a destructive element in the protagonist's own nature. Antithesis Establishing a clear, contrasting relationship between two ideas by joining them together or juxtaposing them, often in parallel structure.
Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.
A moral fable, usually featuring animals or inanimate objects which act like human beings in order to shed light on the human condition. Often, the apologue highlights the foolishness of mankind. The beast fable, and the fables of Aesop are examples. Some critics have called Samuel Johnson's Rasselas an apologue rather than a novel because it is more concerned with moral philosophy than with character or plot. A figure of speech in which someone absent or dead or something non-human is addressed as if alive and present and could reply.