Frame story

Last updated

A 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. The frame story leads readers from a first story into one or more other stories within it. The frame story may also 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. [1] [2] [3] A notable example is the 1001 Nights or The Decameron .

Contents

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. Painting of Odysseus at the Court of Alcinous by Francesco Hayez, 1814-1815 Francesco Hayez 028.jpg
One of the earliest frame stories is in the Odyssey , which begins with Odysseus telling stories to King Alcinous on the island of Scheria. Painting of Odysseus at the Court of Alcinous by Francesco Hayez, 1814–1815

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 . [4] [5] 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 . [6] 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), [7] The Decameron , [3] 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". [3] [8]

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. [2] [9]

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. Illustration Sindbad the sailor and Ali Baba and the forty thieves by William Strang, 1896 William-Strang-Sindbad-AliBaba-titlepage.JPG
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 . Illustration Sindbad the sailor and Ali Baba and the forty thieves by William Strang, 1896

A 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. Sometimes a story within the main narrative encapsulates some aspect of the framing story, in which case it is called a mise en abyme . [10]

A typical frame story is One Thousand and One Nights , in which the character Scheherazade narrates a set of fairy tales to the Sultan Shahriyar over many nights. 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. [7]

Ovid's Metamorphoses makes extensive use of framing, with the stories nested several deep, allowing the inclusion of many different tales in one work. [11] Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights uses this literary device to tell the story of Heathcliff and Catherine, along with the subplots. [2] Her sister Anne uses this device in her epistolary novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall . The main heroine's diary is framed by the narrator's story and letters. [12]

Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein has multiple framed narratives. In the book, Robert Walton writes letters to his sister, describing the story told to him by the scientist Victor Frankenstein. Midway through Frankenstein's story, he is met by the monster, who tells him his own story after he was created, and this third narrative even briefly contains the tale of a family whom he had been observing. [2] [13] This set of frame narratives that fit together is sometimes called a Chinese box narrative; [14] other instances of this style of narrative can be found in Plato's Symposion , Jostein Gaarder's The Solitaire Mystery , Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights , [15] and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness .

Frame stories have appeared in comic books. 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. [16]

The Return of Rip Van Winkle, painting by John Quidor, 1849 QuidorRipVanWinkle.jpg
The Return of Rip Van Winkle , painting by John Quidor, 1849

Sometimes, as in Washington Irving's Sketch Book, which contains "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle" among others, the conceit is that the author of the book is not the real author but a fictional character, in this case a man named Crayon. Here the frame includes the world of the imagined Crayon, his stories, and the reader who is assumed to play along and "know" who Crayon is. [17]

Single story

When there is a single story, the frame story is used for other purposes – chiefly to position the reader's attitude toward the tale. This can be done in a variety of ways.

Casting doubt on the narrator

A common reason to frame a single story is to draw attention to the narrator's unreliability. By explicitly making the narrator a character within the frame story, the writer distances him or herself from the narrator. The writer may characterize the narrator to cast doubt on the narrator's truthfulness, as when in P. G. Wodehouse's stories of Mr. Mulliner, Mulliner is made a fly fisherman, a person who is expected to tell tales of unbelievably large fish.[ citation needed ] The movie Amadeus is framed as a story that an old Antonio Salieri tells to a young priest, because the movie is based more on stories Salieri told about Mozart than on historical fact. [18]

Procatalepsis

Another use is a form of procatalepsis, where the writer puts the readers' possible reactions to the story in the characters listening to it. In The Princess Bride the frame of a grandfather reading the story to his reluctant grandson puts the cynical reaction a viewer might have to the romantic fairytale into the story in the grandson's persona, and helps defuse it. This is the use when the frame tells a story that lacks a strong narrative hook in its opening; the narrator can engage the reader's interest by telling the story to answer the curiosity of his listeners, or by warning them that the story began in an ordinary seeming way, but they must follow it to understand later actions, thereby identifying the reader's wondering whether the story is worth reading to the listeners'. [19] Such an approach was used, too, by Edith Wharton in her novella Ethan Frome , in which a nameless narrator hears from many characters in the town of Starkfield about the main character Ethan's story. [20]

Dream vision

A specialized form of the frame is a dream vision, where the narrator claims to have gone to sleep, dreamed the events of the story, and then awoken to tell the tale. In medieval Europe, this was a common device, used to indicate that the events included are fictional; Geoffrey Chaucer used it in The Book of the Duchess , The House of Fame , Parlement of Foules , and The Legend of Good Women (the last also containing a multi-story frame story within the dream).[ citation needed ] Later, John Bunyan used a dream device in the Christian allegory Pilgrim's Progress and its sequel, explaining that they were dreams he had while he was in prison and felt God wanted him to write down. This worked because it made what might have been seen as a fantasy more like a divine revelation to others who believed as he did. [21]

In modern usage, it is sometimes used in works of fantasy as a means toward suspension of disbelief about the marvels depicted in the story. J.R.R. Tolkien, in his essay "On Fairy-Stories" complained of such devices as unwillingness to treat the genre seriously; he used frame stories of different kinds in his Middle-earth writings. [22] Lewis Carroll's Alice stories ( Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass ) includes such a frame, the stories themselves using dream-like logic and sequences. [23]

Still, even as the story proceeds realistically, the dream frame casts doubt on the events. In the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , the events really occur; the dream frame added for the movie detracts from the validity of the fantasy. [24]

Use

To be a frame narrative, the story must act primarily as an occasion for the telling of other stories. For example, Odysseus narrates much of the Odyssey to the Phaeacians, but, even though this recollection forms a great part of the poem, the events after and before the interpolated recollection are of greater interest than the memory. [2]

A film that plays with frame narrative is the 1994 Forrest Gump . Most of it is narrated by Forrest to various companions on the bus-stop bench. However, in the last fifth or so of the film, Forrest gets up and leaves the bench, and we follow him as he meets with Jenny and her son. This final segment suddenly has no narrator unlike the rest of the film that came before it, but is instead told through Forrest and Jenny's dialogues. [25]

This approach is also demonstrated in the 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire (adapted from the 2005 novel Q & A ), about a poor street kid named Jamal who comes close to winning Kaun Banega Crorepati (the Indian equivalent of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? ) but finds himself accused of cheating. Most of the story is narrated at a police station by Jamal, who explains how he knew the answers to each of the questions as the show is played back on video. The show itself then serves as another framing device, as Jamal sees flashbacks of his past as each question is asked. The last portion of the film then unfolds without any narrator. [26]

Compared to reprise

In musical sonata form or rondo, a reprised theme occurs at the beginning and end of the work, or returns periodically. [27] A framing device may take the form of a recurrent element at the beginning and end of the narrative. For example, a story may begin with a character visiting a park under one set of circumstances, then returning at the end to the same park under a different set of circumstances, having undergone a change that allows him or her to see the park in a new light. [28]

A framing device might simply be a defining image of the narrative or art that is used at the beginning and end of the work, as in the film Chariots of Fire which begins and ends with the characters running along a beach, accompanied at both times by the movie's famous theme music. This scene, although chronologically in the middle of the film and unimportant to the straightforward plot, serves to convey a defining emotion and tone that sets the context for the main story. [29]

See also

Related Research Articles

<i>The Canterbury Tales</i> Story collection by Geoffrey Chaucer

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of twenty-four stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. It is widely regarded as Chaucer's magnum opus. The tales are presented as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together from London to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The prize for this contest is a free meal at the Tabard Inn at Southwark on their return.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Epistolary novel</span> Novel written as a series of letters

An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of letters between the fictional characters of a narrative. The term is often extended to cover novels that intersperse documents of other kinds with the letters, most commonly diary entries and newspaper clippings, and sometimes considered to include novels composed of documents even if they do not include letters at all. More recently, epistolaries may include electronic documents such as recordings and radio, blog posts, and e-mails. The word epistolary is derived from Latin from the Greek word epistolē, meaning a letter (see epistle). This type of fiction is also sometimes known by the German term Briefroman or more generally as epistolary fiction.

<i>One Thousand and One Nights</i> Collection of Middle Eastern folk tales

One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of Middle Eastern folktales compiled in the Arabic language during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the Arabian Nights, from the first English-language edition, which rendered the title as The Arabian Nights' Entertainment.

<i>Wuthering Heights</i> 1847 novel by Emily Brontë

Wuthering Heights is the only novel by the English author Emily Brontë, initially published in 1847 under her pen name "Ellis Bell". It concerns two families of the landed gentry living on the West Yorkshire moors, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and their turbulent relationships with the Earnshaws' foster son, Heathcliff. The novel, influenced by Romanticism and Gothic fiction, is considered a classic of English literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">First-person narrative</span> Mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves

A first-person narrative is a mode of storytelling in which a storyteller recounts events from that storyteller's own personal point of view, using first-person grammar such as "I", "me", "my", and "myself". It must be narrated by a first-person character, such as a protagonist, re-teller, witness, or peripheral character. Alternatively, in a visual storytelling medium, the first-person perspective is a graphical perspective rendered through a character's visual field, so the camera is "seeing" out of a character's eyes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Story within a story</span> Literary device

A story within a story, also referred to as an embedded narrative, is a literary device in which a character within a story becomes the narrator of a second story. Multiple layers of stories within stories are sometimes called nested stories. A play may have a brief play within it, such as in Shakespeare's play Hamlet; a film may show the characters watching a short film; or a novel may contain a short story within the novel. A story within a story can be used in all types of narration including poems, and songs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Narrative</span> Account that presents connected events

A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether non-fictional or fictional. Narratives can be presented through a sequence of written or spoken words, through still or moving images, or through any combination of these. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, which is derived from the adjective gnarus. The formal and literary process of constructing a narrative—narration—is one of the four traditional rhetorical modes of discourse, along with argumentation, description, and exposition. This is a somewhat distinct usage from narration in the narrower sense of a commentary used to convey a story. Many additional narrative techniques, particularly literary ones, are used to build and enhance any given story.

Metafiction is a form of fiction that emphasizes its own narrative structure in a way that inherently reminds the audience that they are reading or viewing a fictional work. Metafiction is self-conscious about language, literary form, and story-telling, and works of metafiction directly or indirectly draw attention to their status as artifacts. Metafiction is frequently used as a form of parody or a tool to undermine literary conventions and explore the relationship between literature and reality, life and art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sinbad the Sailor</span> Fictional sailor

Sinbad the Sailor is a fictional mariner and the hero of a story-cycle. He is described as hailing from Baghdad during the early Abbasid Caliphate. In the course of seven voyages throughout the seas east of Africa and south of Asia, he has fantastic adventures in magical realms, encountering monsters and witnessing supernatural phenomena.

Diegesis is a style of fiction storytelling in which a participating narrator offers an on-site, often interior, view of the scene to the reader, viewer, or listener by subjectively describing the actions and, in some cases, thoughts, of one or more characters. Diegetic events are those experienced by both the characters within a piece and the audience, while non-diegetic elements of a story make up the "fourth wall" separating the characters from the audience. Diegesis in music describes a character's ability to hear the music presented for the audience, in the context of musical theatre or film scoring.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Unreliable narrator</span> Narrator whose credibility is compromised

In literature, film, and other such arts, an unreliable narrator is a narrator who cannot be trusted, one whose credibility is compromised. They can be found in fiction and film, and range from children to mature characters. While unreliable narrators are almost by definition first-person narrators, arguments have been made for the existence of unreliable second- and third-person narrators, especially within the context of film and television, but sometimes also in literature.

Narrative poetry is a form of poetry that tells a story, often using the voices of both a narrator and characters; the entire story is usually written in metered verse. Narrative poems do not need to rhyme. The poems that make up this genre may be short or long, and the story it relates to may be complex. It is normally dramatic, with various characters. Narrative poems include all epic poetry, and the various types of "lay", most ballads, and some idylls, as well as many poems not falling into a distinct type.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Foreshadowing</span> Literary technique

Foreshadowing is a narrative device in which a storyteller gives an advance hint of what is to come later in the story. Foreshadowing often appears at the beginning of a story, and it helps develop or subvert the audience's expectations about upcoming events.

Narration is the use of a written or spoken commentary to convey a story to an audience. Narration is conveyed by a narrator: a specific person, or unspecified literary voice, developed by the creator of the story to deliver information to the audience, particularly about the plot: the series of events. Narration is a required element of all written stories, presenting the story in its entirety. It is optional in most other storytelling formats, such as films, plays, television shows and video games, in which the story can be conveyed through other means, like dialogue between characters or visual action.

A plot twist is a literary technique that introduces a radical change in the direction or expected outcome of the plot in a work of fiction. When it happens near the end of a story, it is known as a twist ending or surprise ending. It may change the audience's perception of the preceding events, or introduce a new conflict that places it in a different context. A plot twist may be foreshadowed, to prepare the audience to accept it, but it usually comes with some element of surprise. There are various methods used to execute a plot twist, such as withholding information from the audience, or misleading them with ambiguous or false information. Not every plot has a twist, but some have multiple lesser ones, and some are defined by a single major twist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">General Prologue</span> First part of "The Canterbury Tales"

The General Prologue is the first part of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. It introduces the frame story, in which a group of pilgrims travelling to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury agree to take part in a storytelling competition, and describes the pilgrims themselves. The Prologue is arguably the most familiar section of The Canterbury Tales, depicting traffic between places, languages and cultures, as well as introducing and describing the pilgrims who will narrate the tales.

A flashback, more formally known as analepsis, is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point in the story. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story's primary sequence of events to fill in crucial backstory. In the opposite direction, a flashforward reveals events that will occur in the future. Both flashback and flashforward are used to cohere a story, develop a character, or add structure to the narrative. In literature, internal analepsis is a flashback to an earlier point in the narrative; external analepsis is a flashback to a time before the narrative started.

<i>The Decameron</i> 14th-century collection of stories by Giovanni Boccaccio

The Decameron, subtitled Prince Galehaut and sometimes nicknamed l'Umana commedia, is a collection of short stories by the 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375). The book is structured as a frame story containing 100 tales told by a group of seven young women and three young men; they shelter in a secluded villa just outside Florence in order to escape the Black Death, which was afflicting the city. Boccaccio probably conceived of the Decameron after the epidemic of 1348, and completed it by 1353. The various tales of love in The Decameron range from the erotic to the tragic. Tales of wit, practical jokes, and life lessons contribute to the mosaic. In addition to its literary value and widespread influence, it provides a document of life at the time. Written in the vernacular of the Florentine language, it is considered a masterpiece of early Italian prose.

J. R. R. Tolkien used frame stories throughout his Middle-earth writings, especially his legendarium, to make the works resemble a genuine mythology written and edited by many hands over a long period of time. He described in detail how his fictional characters wrote their books and transmitted them to others, and showed how later in-universe editors annotated the material.

Storytelling is explored in multiple ways in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, with stories told in different styles, attributed to many different characters with limited knowledge of events, as well as an omniscient narrator. Tolkien weaves together a complex story in the style of an interlaced medieval tapestry romance. Much dialogue and many stories and poems are embedded in the narrative. Alongside the main narrative are many other elements such as genealogies and footnotes, giving the impression that Tolkien was the editor and translator of the work, forming an editorial frame that includes a figure of himself in the story.

References

  1. ↑ "What is a Frame Story? Oregon State Guide to Literary Terms". College of Liberal Arts. 6 September 2020. Retrieved 30 June 2021.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Frame Story - Examples and Definition of Frame Story". Literary Devices. 11 April 2016. Retrieved 30 June 2021.
  3. 1 2 3 "The Frame Narrative". Harvard University . Retrieved 30 June 2021.
  4. ↑ Clute, John; Grant, John, eds. (1999). The Encyclopedia of Fantasy . Macmillan. p. 312. ISBN   9780312198695.
  5. ↑ Jay, Jacqueline E. (2016). Orality and Literacy in the Demotic Tales. Brill. pp. 27–32, 211–212. ISBN   9789004323070.
  6. ↑ Witzel, Michael E.J. (1987). "On the origin of the literary device of the 'Frame Story' in Old Indian literature". In Falk, H. (ed.). Hinduismus und Buddhismus, Festschrift für U. Schneider. Freiburg. pp. 380–414. ISBN   3-925270-01-9.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  7. 1 2 Hoh, Anchi (26 October 2017). "A Thousand and One Nights: Arabian Story-telling in World Literature". Library of Congress. Retrieved 7 May 2021.
  8. ↑ Coulton, George Gordon (1908). Chaucer and His England. Putnam. p. 126.
  9. ↑ Ginsburg, Michal Peled (1997). Prince, Gerald; Reid, Ian; Duyfhuizen, Bernard (eds.). "Framing Narrative". Poetics Today . 18 (4): 571–588. doi:10.2307/1773187. ISSN   0333-5372. JSTOR   1773187.
  10. ↑ Hayward, Susan (2006). "Mise-en-abime". Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts (third ed.). Routledge. pp. 252–253.
  11. ↑ Ovid (1990). "Ovid's Framing Technique: The Aeacus and Cephalus Epyllion (Met. 7.490-8.5)". The Classical Journal. 86 (1): 35–44. JSTOR   3297921.
  12. ↑ Allott, Miriam (2013). The Brontës: The Critical Heritage. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. pp. 254–256. ISBN   978-1136173813.
  13. ↑ Shelley, Mary Godwin. "Frankenstein". Gutenberg. Retrieved 24 December 2020.
  14. ↑ Zhang, Benzi (1993-06-01). "Paradox of Chinese Boxes: Textual Heterarchy in Postermodern Fiction". Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/ Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée: 89–103. ISSN   1913-9659.
  15. ↑ Sakuma, Chihiro. "Narrative Structures and Spaces in the English Romantic Novel: An Intertextual Study of Mary Shelley, Charles Maturin and the Bronts".{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  16. ↑ Manning, Matthew K. (2010). "1980s". In Dolan, Hannah (ed.). DC Comics Year By Year A Visual Chronicle. London: Dorling Kindersley. p. 247. ISBN   978-0-7566-6742-9.
  17. ↑ Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Wolf's Mount. 2013. p. 11, notes by editor. GGKEY:GH4HD41JQT1.
  18. ↑ Viljoen, Martina; Viljoen, Nicol (June 2018). "Amadeus: A Vision of Musical Genius". International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music. 49 (1): 29–523. JSTOR   26844631.
  19. ↑ Martinelli, Marissa (21 November 2018). "The Princess Bride You Don't Know". Slate. Retrieved 30 June 2021.
  20. ↑ Wagner, Johanna M.; Demoor, Marysa (2012). "The Slippery Slope of Interpellation: Framing Hero and Victim in Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome". Neophilologus. 97 (2): 417–435. doi:10.1007/s11061-012-9319-z. ISSN   0028-2677. S2CID   170215022.
  21. ↑ Bertsch, Janet (August 2000). The Whole Story Language, Narrative and Salvation in Bunyan, Defoe, Grimmelshausen and Schnabel (PDF). University College London, PhD Thesis. pp. 217–218.
  22. ↑ Tolkien, J.R.R. (2001). Tree and Leaf, Mythopoeia, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son. London: HarperCollins. p. 14. ISBN   978-0-007-10504-5.
  23. ↑ Madden, William A. (May 1986). "Framing the Alices". PMLA. 101 (3): 362–373. doi:10.2307/462421. JSTOR   462421. S2CID   163488337.
  24. ↑ Jones, Steven Swann (1995). The Fairy Tale: The Magic Mirror of Imagination. New York: Twayne Publishers. p. 94. ISBN   0-8057-0950-9.
  25. ↑ "A Frame Story". Wholesale Frame Company. 5 March 2019. Retrieved 30 June 2021.
  26. ↑ Miguel, Andres (14 January 2009). ""Slumdog Millionaire" is well done but a bit hollow". The Pitt News. Retrieved 30 June 2021.
  27. ↑ Stein, Deborah (2005). Engaging music: essays in music analysis. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 331. ISBN   978-0-19-517010-8. OCLC   54752753.
  28. ↑ Moraru, Christian (2005). Memorious Discourse: Reprise and Representation in Postmodernism. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. p. 16. ISBN   978-0-8386-4086-9.
  29. ↑ "Chariots of Fire: The flame of conviction". David Puttnam. Retrieved 30 June 2021.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.