The F Words: Framing Device

In literature, a framing device is a story that surrounds another story. That is, a novel begins with a story, and that story is interrupted by another story, told to completion. And after the inner story ends, the novel returns to the starting story and finishes that. Some examples of frame stories are Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. I call this the Hard Frame because it’s clearly two different stories, one within the ...