Frame story

Origins

Some of the earliest frame stories come from ancient Egypt, including examples in the Papyrus Westcar, the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, and The Eloquent Peasant. The form spread westward, giving rise to collections like the One Thousand and One Nights, The Decameron, and the Canterbury Tales. The frame tale reached its European popularity peak in the 14th century with Juan Ruiz's Libro de buen amor. Homer's Odyssey also uses this technique, with Odysseus narrating his wanderings at the court of King Alcinous.

A set of stories

A frame story often serves as a convenient conceit to organize a set of smaller narratives, which may be devised by the author or adapted from existing tales. In One Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade narrates fairy tales to Sultan Shahriyar, and many of her tales themselves contain frames, such as the Tale of Sindbad the Seaman and Sindbad the Landsman. Ovid's Metamorphoses nests stories several deep. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights uses a frame to tell the story of Heathcliff and Catherine, while her sister Anne employs the device in the epistolary novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, where the heroine's diary is framed by the narrator's story and letters.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein contains multiple framed narratives: Robert Walton writes letters to his sister recounting Victor Frankenstein's story, which itself includes the monster's tale, which briefly contains the story of a family the monster observed. This nested structure is sometimes called a Chinese box narrative, also seen in Plato's Symposion, Jostein Gaarder's The Solitaire Mystery, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Frame stories have appeared in comic books, such as Neil Gaiman's The Sandman story arc Worlds End. In Washington Irving's Sketch Book, the conceit is that the author is a fictional character named Crayon, framing the world of his stories and the reader's assumed participation.

Single story

A single story enclosed by a frame often serves to shape how the reader feels about the main tale. One frequent goal is to signal that the narrator may not be trustworthy. The writer makes the narrator a character in the frame, creating distance and planting doubt.

For instance, P. G. Wodehouse portrays Mr. Mulliner as a fly fisherman, a type known for exaggerating the size of his catch. In the film Amadeus, an elderly Salieri recounts events to a young priest, a setup that acknowledges the story’s basis in Salieri’s own embellished accounts rather than strict facts. Another technique is a kind of procatalepsis: the writer puts the audience’s likely objections into the mouths of listeners within the frame. The Princess Bride uses a grandfather reading to a skeptical grandson, whose reactions mirror and defuse a viewer’s cynicism toward the romantic fantasy.

Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome employs a nameless narrator who pieces together the protagonist’s story from local gossip, drawing the reader in. Frame stories can also rely on false documents to reveal how the inner narrative was found. Examples include the letters given to Mr. Utterson in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the Historical Notes epilogue in The Handmaid’s Tale explaining the audio cassettes, and the entire structure of epistolary novels.

Use

For a narrative to be a frame narrative, the story must primarily serve as an occasion for telling other stories. In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus narrates much of the poem to the Phaeacians, but the events before and after his recollection are of greater interest than the memory itself. The 1994 film Forrest Gump uses a frame narrative: most of the story is narrated by Forrest to companions on a bus-stop bench, but in the final segment he leaves the bench and the story unfolds without a narrator, told through dialogue. Similarly, the 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire frames most of its story through Jamal's narration at a police station, explaining how he knew answers to quiz show questions, with the show itself serving as another framing device; the last portion then proceeds without a narrator.

Did You Know?

• In musical sonata form or rondo, a reprised theme occurs at the beginning and end of the work, similar to a framing device.
• A framing device may take the form of a recurrent element at the beginning and end of the narrative, such as a character returning to a park under changed circumstances.
• The film Chariots of Fire begins and ends with characters running along a beach, accompanied by the movie's famous theme music, conveying a defining emotion and tone.