What Is a Frame Story?
A story within a story.
A Story Inception: The Frame Story
A frame story, also known as a story within a story, is a literary technique where a secondary story is placed within the primary story.
The outer story or frame provides a context or setting for the inner story, which is sometimes known as a reflective narrative or an embedded narrative.
Examples of frame stories can be found in a variety of literary genres, from classic works such as Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio's The Decameron to contemporary novels such as David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin.
The frame story, or story-within-a-story technique, has been used extensively in literature throughout the centuries. Here are two examples of how authors have utilized this technique to convey their narratives:
In Chaucer's famous work, a group of pilgrims traveling to Canterbury tell each other stories to pass the time. Each traveler's tale is framed by the larger story of their pilgrimage, creating a complex web of narratives that explore themes of love, religious devotion, and human nature.
O'Brien's modern classic of the Vietnam War is structured around a series of interlocking frame stories. The narrator, also named Tim O'Brien, tells stories of his time in Vietnam and his life after the war, but also tells stories about the men in his unit and the events that shaped them. These narratives all come together to paint a moving portrait of the war and its aftermath.