Frame Stories
An early phenomenon related to the "story within a story" is the "framing device" or "frame story", where a supplemental story is used to help tell the main story. In the supplemental story, or "frame", one or more characters tell the main story to one or more other characters.
The earliest examples of "frame stories" and "stories within stories" were in ancient Indian literature, such as the Mahabharata, Ramayana, Fables of Bidpai, Hitopadesha and Vikram and the Vampire. Both The Golden Ass by Apuleius and Metamorphoses by Ovid extend the depths of framing to several degrees. Another early example is the famous Arabian Nights, in which Sheherazade narrates stories within stories, and even within some of these, more stories are narrated. Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales is also a frame story.
A well-known modern example of this is The Princess Bride, both the book and the movie. In the movie, a grandfather is reading the story of "The Princess Bride" to his grandson. In the book, a more detailed frame story has a father editing a (nonexistent) much longer work for his son, creating his own "Good Parts Version" (as the book called it) by leaving out all the parts that would bore a young boy. Both the book and the movie assert that the central story is from a book called "The Princess Bride" by a nonexistent author named S. Morgenstern.
Sometimes a frame story exists in the same setting as the main story. On the television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, each episode was framed as though it were being told by an older Indy (usually a very elderly George Hall, though one featured Harrison Ford).
Read more about this topic: Story Within A Story
Famous quotes containing the words frame and/or stories:
“Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.”
—Janet Frame (b. 1924)
“Reporters are not paid to operate in retrospect. Because when news begins to solidify into current events and finally harden into history, it is the stories we didn’t write, the questions we didn’t ask that prove far, far more damaging than the ones we did.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)