narrative frame
Tale's outer structure
A narrative frame is a story-within-a-story structure, where an outer narrative contains and introduces an inner one.
The frame provides context, a narrator, or a reason for telling the tale: The Canterbury Tales uses a pilgrimage as its narrative frame.
Frame narratives can establish credibility, create distance, or allow multiple perspectives to emerge through the framing device.
- Canterbury TalesMedieval English story collection
- FrankensteinGothic novel's mad scientist
- Chinese boxesContainers that nest inside each other
- Russian dollsHollow figures containing smaller copies
- Cloud AtlasInterconnected multi-era saga
flashback · point of view · prologue · Wuthering Heights · One Thousand and One Nights · intertextuality · Decameron · perspective shift · plot structure · exposition · dramatic irony · foreshadowing · historical context · genre conventions · once upon a time · tale as old as time · mockumentary · world-building
- metafictionfourth wall break, self-reference, breaking the fourth wall, metanarrative, metafiction
- narratologyplot, story, character, protagonist, antagonist
- fictionfiction, novel, novels, novella, novellas
- storytellingstorytelling, story, tale, storyteller, story time
- Cupid and PsychePsyche, Cupid, Eros, Venus, Aphrodite
- framingbeam, stud, rafter, joist, truss
narrative framelinear narrative
Story following chronological order
stream of consciousness · showing · direct discourse · in medias res
narrative, frame, narrate, narration, narrator, narratives, narrated, narrating, framed