ABSTRACT
The building blocks of a story Some important insights about this idea were gained by the work of the folklorist Vladimir Propp whose book Morphology of the Folktale explores the fundamental building blocks (and variants) of ‘story’. These basic narrative elements are:
Hero – a figure representing human strengths and noble qualities. Villain – an equal and opposite figure representing the ‘shadow’ side of a
person, the mean qualities, evil and selfishness. Problem – every story features a central problem which the hero must resolve
and around which all the action of the story revolves. Subsidiary problems arise as a consequence of the heroic struggle towards resolution.
