Frame Narrative

The frame narrative (frame composition) is a compositional device in which one work (or several inset tales) is placed within the frame of another: there is a main 'framing' narrative inside which inset stories unfold, united by a common situation or narrator. The frame narrative allows one to combine several plots, introduce a storyteller, create the effect of a 'story within a story', and play with different temporal and narrative planes. A classic model of world literature is Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, in which ten young people, escaping the plague, tell one another a hundred novellas; the same structure marks the Thousand and One Nights with its narrator Scheherazade. In Ukrainian literature the frame composition was used by authors of story collections and by writers who introduced the figure of a mediating narrator; the frame heightens artistic conventionality, emphasizes the process of storytelling, and masterfully unites heterogeneous material into an artistic whole.