A frame narrative is a story that contains another story within it. The outer narrative provides a context for the telling of the inner one.

Chaucer’s pilgrims agree to tell tales on the road to Canterbury; the pilgrimage is the frame. In Frankenstein Walton’s letters enclose Victor’s narrative, which itself encloses the creature’s. One Thousand and One Nights uses Scheherazade’s situation as a frame for dozens of embedded tales. The structure can create distance, add layers of reliability or unreliability, and comment on the act of storytelling itself.

Frame narratives vary in how fully the outer story is developed. Sometimes the frame is elaborate and returns at the end; sometimes it is a brief prologue and epilogue. The relationship between frame and embedded story is part of the work’s meaning: the outer situation may parallel, contrast with, or motivate the inner narrative. The form remains popular because it multiplies perspectives and draws attention to how stories are shaped by their tellers.

When one narrative exists for the purpose of containing and presenting another, the structure is a frame narrative.