![]() ![]() ![]() The Return of Rip Van Winkle, painting by John Quidor, 1849 Neil Gaiman's comic book series The Sandman featured a story arc called Worlds End which consisted of frame stories, and sometimes even featured stories within stories within stories. įrame stories have appeared in comic books. Frankenstein's story contains the monster's story, and its story even briefly contains the tale of a family whom he had been observing. In the book, Robert Walton writes letters to his sister, describing the story told to him by the scientist Victor Frankenstein. Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein has multiple framed narratives. The main heroine's diary is framed by the narrator's story and letters. Her sister Anne uses this device in her epistolary novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights uses this literary device to tell the story of Heathcliff and Catherine, along with the subplots. Ovid's Metamorphoses makes extensive use of framing, with the stories nested several deep, allowing the inclusion of many different tales in one work. Many of Shahrazad's tales are also frame stories, such as Tale of Sindbad the Seaman and Sindbad the Landsman, a collection of adventures related by Sindbad the Seaman to Sindbad the Landsman. Ī typical frame story is One Thousand and One Nights, in which the character Shahrazad narrates a set of fairy tales to the Sultan Shahriyar over many nights. Sometimes a story within the main narrative encapsulates some aspect of the framing story, in which case it is called a mise en abyme. ![]() Illustration Sindbad the sailor and Ali Baba and the forty thieves by William Strang, 1896Ī frame story is a literary device that acts as a convenient conceit to organize a set of smaller narratives, either devised by the author or taken from a previous stock of popular tales, slightly altered by the author for the purpose of the longer narrative. A set of stories One Thousand and One Nights frames many stories with a single narrator, Shahrazad embedded within it are further framed sets of tales, such as those of Sindbad the Sailor. 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. 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". 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. 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. Painting of Odysseus at the Court of Alcinous by Francesco Hayez, 1814-1815 Origins One of the earliest frame stories is in the Odyssey, which begins with Odysseus telling stories to King Alcinous on the island of Scheria. ![]() This should not be confused with narrative structure. The frame story may also be used to inform readers about aspects of the secondary narrative(s) that may otherwise be hard to understand. The frame story leads readers from a first story into one or more other stories within it. Story in a nested narration that brackets one or more embedded storiesĪ frame story (also known as a frame tale, frame narrative, sandwich narrative, or intercalation) is a literary technique that serves as a companion piece to a story within a story, where an introductory or main narrative sets the stage either for a more emphasized second narrative or for a set of shorter stories. ![]()
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