Frame Stories in Literature

Recently, the kids and I read a few of The Canterbury Tales. We talked about the idea of frame stories. The Princess Bride is a good example of a frame story. There’s the whole narrative about Buttercup and Wesley, but there’s the outside story of the grandfather visiting his grandson while he’s sick. In The Canterbury Tales, there are a whole bunch of stories told within the frame story of a group of diverse people going together on a pilgrimage.

It’s an interesting literary device, and I’ve been thinking about how I can use it in my own writing. Now I’m reading Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, and he seems to take the frame story to a more sophisticated level.

The first couple hundred pages of the book cover about 16 hours, but there are so many stories told in conversations that the content seems to cover years (and in some ways, it actually does).

I’m working on the sequel to Six Floors from Somewhere, and I’ve been thinking about ways to use frame stories to introduce some back story. For example, our good friend Harriet hasn’t always been a little old lady. Maybe a little frame story could help us not only to understand Harriet a little better but also to introduce some variety.
Some well-known frame stories:

• Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
• Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
• Citizen Kane
• Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
• Lots of Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Love’s Labour’s Lost
• Boccacio’s Decameron
  

From these examples, it seems there are many ways to structure frame stories. You can have one character telling a story to another character, like in Heart of Darkness and The Canterbury Tales. You could let one story be a dream. A story could be contained within a document, such as a letter or a journal entry. You could even “nest” stories within each other, similar to the strategy used in the film Inception.

Frame stories are interesting literary devices, both for the readers and for the writers. Have you tried using them in your own writing?