Frame story

A frame story (also known as a frame tale, framing device, frame narrative, sandwich narrative, nested narrative, or intercalation) is the literary technique and narrative structure in which an opening narrative introduces either a more emphasized second narrative or a set of shorter tales. The frame story leads readers from a first story into one or more other in-depth stories within it. In other words, a frame story is the use of one or more stories-within-a-story across the majority of a narrative's content, where the inner story is the main one: the one with the most detail.

The frame story may be used to inform readers about aspects of the secondary narrative(s) that may otherwise be hard to understand. This should not be confused with narrative structure. Notable examples are the 1001 Nights and The Decameron.

Origins

Some of the earliest frame stories are from ancient Egypt, including one in the Papyrus Westcar, the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, and The Eloquent Peasant. Other early examples are from Indian literature, including the Sanskrit epics Mahabharata, Ramayana, Panchatantra, Syntipas's The Seven Wise Masters, and the fable collections Hitopadesha and Vikram and The Vampire. This form gradually spread west through the centuries and became popular, giving rise to such classic frame tale collections as the One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights), The Decameron, and the Canterbury Tales, in which each pilgrim tells his own kind of tale, and whose frame story "was once the most admired part of Chaucer's work". "The frame tale reached the height of its popularity in Europe in the 14th century with the composition of Juan Ruiz's Libro de buen amor (1330–1343)."

The use of a frame story in which a single narrative is set in the context of the telling of a story is also a technique with a long history, dating back at least to the beginning section of Homer's Odyssey, in which the narrator Odysseus tells of his wandering in the court of King Alcinous.