Frame story

A narrative structure in which an outer story introduces or contains one or more inner tales, linking them through a shared situation, narrator, or theme.

Embedded narrative: A story presented within another story rather than directly in the work’s primary narrative. The inner tale is the defining structural unit contained by a frame.
One Thousand and One Nights: A collection of Middle Eastern tales linked by Scheherazade’s nightly storytelling to King Shahryar. Its recurring court narrative makes the frame itself a source of suspense.
Panchatantra: An ancient Sanskrit collection of animal fables and political instruction organized through interlinked stories. Its nested tales exemplify an early South Asian tradition of stories embedded within others.
Anthology: A collection of selected literary or artistic works, often by multiple creators. An anthology groups tales without necessarily giving them a shared fictional situation.
Narrative level: A position in a story’s hierarchy, such as the level of the narrator or an embedded tale. A frame story organizes events across distinct levels of narration.
The Canterbury Tales: Geoffrey Chaucer’s collection of verse narratives presented as tales told by pilgrims traveling to Canterbury. The pilgrimage supplies a social frame for a varied set of individual tales.
Jataka tales: Stories of the Buddha’s previous lives, often told to illuminate a moral or teaching. Many tales use a present occasion to introduce a story from an earlier life.
Episodic narrative: A narrative built from relatively self-contained episodes linked by characters, setting, or a loose progression. Episodes can stand together without one story introducing or containing the others.
Narrator: The voice or agent that presents a narrative to an audience. A narrator often introduces the frame and tells or relays the inner tales.
Frankenstein: Mary Shelley’s novel in which Robert Walton’s letters contain Victor Frankenstein’s account and the creature’s narrative. Its nested narrators make the frame a chain of testimony about the creature.

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