A frame story is an outer narrative that introduces and surrounds one or more inner stories. The frame shows who is telling the inner story, to whom, and why. It usually opens the work, often closes it, and shapes how the reader takes everything in between.
It also goes by frame narrative, frame tale or framing device, and the stories inside it are called embedded narratives. The frame is usually the smaller part: a few pages at each end of a novel, or a handful of scenes a film keeps cutting back to. Old Rose telling the treasure hunters about the ship in Titanic is a frame. So is the bus-stop bench where Forrest Gump tells his life to whoever sits beside him.
Frame story examples
King Shahryar marries a new wife each night and has her killed in the morning. Scheherazade marries him anyway and starts a story she doesn't finish by dawn, so he spares her another day to hear the end. Every tale in the collection is told under that threat, which is why a frame of a few pages carries so much weight.
About thirty pilgrims gather at the Tabard inn in Southwark, and the innkeeper, Harry Bailly, proposes a tale-telling contest on the road to Canterbury. Chaucer got through twenty-four, a few of them left unfinished. The frame earns its keep in the quarrels. The Miller tells a bawdy tale about a gullible carpenter, and the Reeve, who trained as a carpenter, answers with one about a cheating miller.
Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge…
Robert Walton writes to his sister from an Arctic expedition. He takes a half-frozen Victor Frankenstein aboard, and Victor tells his story as a warning to a man as ambitious as he was. Inside it, the creature tells Victor his own. At the end the crew forces Walton to turn for home, "ignorant and disappointed" but alive. Then the creature steps into the frame itself, appearing in Walton's cabin beside Victor's body.
"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth."
An unnamed narrator sits with friends on a yawl in the Thames, waiting for the tide, when Marlow starts talking about the Congo. On the last page the book returns to the boat. They have missed the tide, and the river seems to lead "into the heart of an immense darkness." London has been drawn into the tale. The Turn of the Screw does the opposite: a guest at a Christmas house party reads out a dead governess's manuscript, and the book ends inside it. Nobody in the frame reacts, so the reader is left alone with her version.
A grandfather reads a book to his sick grandson, who would rather be playing video games and objects whenever there's kissing. His complaints are the ones a skeptical viewer has, so when he gets hooked, the audience has permission to be hooked too. At the end he asks for the story again tomorrow, and the grandfather answers with Westley's line, "As you wish."
The novel reads as Offred's own account until the closing "Historical Notes," a transcript of a 2195 conference where a professor explains how her tapes were found. The frame tells you Gilead fell, and the scholars' detachment from her testimony is the book's last chill.
Common shapes of a frame
| Shape | How it works | Example |
|---|---|---|
| ShapeSingle-tale frame | How it worksOne teller, one long story | ExampleHeart of Darkness |
| ShapeCollection frame | How it worksMany tales held by one situation | ExampleThe Canterbury Tales |
| ShapeNested frame | How it worksA story inside a story inside a story | ExampleFrankenstein |
| ShapeOpen frame | How it worksOpens the book and never returns | ExampleThe Turn of the Screw |
| ShapeLate frame | How it worksAppears only at the end and recasts the rest | ExampleThe Handmaid's Tale |
Writing a frame story
Before you add a frame, decide what it does that the inner story can't do alone. If the answer is "sets the mood," cut it. A frame worth its pages usually does one of these jobs:
- Raise the stakes of telling. Scheherazade talks to stay alive, and a story that bores the king could be her last.
- Give the reader a listener. A listener can ask the reader's questions, doubt the teller or be won over first.
- Let hindsight in. An older narrator knows how it ended and what it cost, and can say so.
- Plant doubt. A teller with a motive makes the reader weigh every line. Nelly Dean, who narrates most of Wuthering Heights (1847) to the tenant Lockwood, took sides in nearly everything she describes.
Give the frame a small arc of its own. Something in the outer story should change by the end: Walton turns the ship, the grandson asks for the book again.
Frames usually fail in one of three ways. The first is the frame as warm-up: a woman finds her grandmother's diary in chapter one, and the book never comes back to her. That is a prologue under another name. The second is cutting back to the frame at the inner story's high points, which drains them. Come back at part breaks, where the reader wants a breath. The third is memory. The frame reminds the reader that someone is recalling all this, so pages of word-perfect dialogue from fifty years ago strain belief. One line in the frame that admits the gaps buys a lot of goodwill.
Flat: My grandmother was ninety-one when she told me about the summer of 1952. I sat beside her bed with a notebook, and she began.
With a reason to tell: Grandma made me switch off the recorder before she started on the summer of 1952. "Your mother has heard a version of this," she said. "When I get to the part she knows, you can turn it back on."
The second version gives the telling a secret, tells the reader there are two accounts of that summer, and sets up the return to the frame: the moment the recorder goes back on.
Frame story vs. story within a story
| Device | What it is | How to tell |
|---|---|---|
| DeviceFrame story | What it isAn outer story in which the main story is told | How to tellThe book is built around the telling |
| DeviceStory within a story | What it isA tale someone tells partway through the main story | How to tellThe tale is one scene among many |
| DeviceFlashback | What it isA jump to an earlier time in the same story | How to tellNo teller, no audience |
| DevicePrologue | What it isA short opening section set apart from the rest | How to tellOften never revisited |
Every frame story contains a story within a story, but not the other way around. In Hamlet the traveling players perform The Murder of Gonzago to catch the king's reaction. That is a story within a story, but Hamlet is not a frame story: the players' performance fills a single scene, and Hamlet's own story is the main event. A flashback has no teller at all, and a prologue becomes a frame only if the book comes back to it.
Frames often team up with other devices. An unreliable narrator is easier to set up when a listener in the frame can notice what the teller leaves out. An epistolary novel can frame itself, as Walton's letters frame Frankenstein. And the Odyssey opens in medias res, then lets Odysseus tell his own wanderings at a king's court. To choose who tells the inner story, read the guide to point of view. To plan where the frame breaks in, sketch both layers in a novel outline.
