Both belong to the category of literature, but novels are mainly fiction, and essays mainly describe real people and events. Both of them are one of the four great writers of literary works, and they usually write personal narratives.
But the novel can be "behind closed doors", and the author can create stories based on life experience and the real world. Even portrait stories or historical novels can use literary means to deal with the narrative language of stories. For example, the novel "Ms. Zhao Yiman" in the 20 18 National College Entrance Examination Chinese Volume is a real character novel.
Prose is divided into narrative prose, lyric prose and reasoning prose. The latter two are quite different from novels, so I don't need to go into details. The former (narrative prose) and novels have one of the biggest characteristics, that is, their narrative nature. But prose is generally about telling real people and expressing personal feelings. For example, the composition "Professor Yan and his scallion cake" in the Chinese volume of Guiyang senior high school entrance examination on 20 18 is a narrative.
Extended data:
Novel is a literary genre that focuses on portraying characters and reflects social life through complete story and environmental description. Novel, poetry, prose and drama are also called "four major literary genres". The methods of portraying characters in novels include psychological description, action description, language description, appearance description and expression description. At the same time, novel is a way of writing.
Prose is a narrative literary genre, which expresses the author's true feelings and flexible writing style. The word "prose" probably appeared in the period of Taiping and Xingguo in the Northern Song Dynasty (65438+February 976-165438+9841October). With the development of the times, the concept of prose has changed from broad to narrow, and it has been influenced by western culture.
Baidu encyclopedia-prose
Baidu Encyclopedia-Novel