Play within a play

A story within a story, also referred to as an embedded narrative, is a literary device in which a character within a story becomes the narrator of a second story (within the first one). Multiple layers of stories within stories are sometimes called nested stories. A play may have a brief play within it, such as Shakespeare's play ''Hamlet''; a film may show the characters watching a short film; or a novel may contain a short story within the novel. A story within a story can be used in all types of narration: novels, short stories, plays, television programs, films, poems, songs, video games, and philosophical essays.

The inner stories are told either simply to add entertainment or more usually to act as an example to the other characters. In either case, the inner story often has a symbolic and psychological significance for the characters in the outer story. There is often some parallel between the two stories, and the fiction of the inner story is used to reveal the truth in the outer story. Often the stories within a story are used to satirize views, not only in the outer story, but also in the real world. When a story is told within another instead of being told as part of the plot, it allows the author to play on the reader's perceptions of the characters—the motives and the reliability of the storyteller are automatically in question.

Stories within a story may disclose the background of characters or events, tell of myths and legends that influence the plot, or even seem to be extraneous diversions from the plot. In some cases, the story within a story is involved in the action of the plot of the outer story. In others, the inner story is independent, so that it can either be skipped over or be read separately, although many subtle connections may be lost. Sometimes, the inner story serves as an outlet for discarded ideas that the author deemed to be of too much merit to leave out completely, somewhat analogous to the inclusion of deleted scenes with home video releases of films. Often there is more than one level of internal stories, leading to deeply-nested fiction. ''Mise en abyme'' is the French term for a similar literary device (also referring to the practice in heraldry of placing the image of a small shield on a larger shield).

Frame stories and anthology works

The literary device of stories within a story dates back to a device known as a "frame story", where a supplemental story is used to help tell the main story. Typically, the outer story or "frame" does not have much matter, and most of the work consists of one or more complete stories told by one or more storytellers.

The earliest examples of "frame stories" and "stories within stories" were in ancient Egyptian and Indian literature, such as the Egyptian "Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor" and Indian epics like the ''Ramayana'', ''Seven Wise Masters'', ''Hitopadesha'' and '' Vikram and the Vampire''. In Vishnu Sarma's ''Panchatantra'', an inter-woven series of colorful animal tales are told with one narrative opening within another, sometimes three or four layers deep, and then unexpectedly snapping shut in irregular rhythms to sustain attention. In the epic ''Mahabharata'', the Kurukshetra War is narrated by a character in Vyasa's ''Jaya'', which itself is narrated by a character in Vaisampayana's ''Bharata'', which itself is narrated by a character in Ugrasrava's ''Mahabharata''.

Both ''The Golden Ass'' by Apuleius and ''Metamorphoses'' by Ovid extend the depths of framing to several degrees. Another early example is the ''One Thousand and One Nights'' (''Arabian Nights''), where the general story is narrated by an unknown narrator, and in this narration the stories are told by Scheherazade. In many of Scheherazade's narrations, there are also stories narrated, and even in some of these, there are some other stories. An example of this is "The Three Apples", a murder mystery narrated by Scheherazade. Within the story, after the murderer reveals himself, he narrates a flashback of events leading up to the murder. Within this flashback, an unreliable narrator tells a story to mislead the would-be murderer, who later discovers that he was misled after another character narrates the truth to him. As the story concludes, the " Tale of Núr al-Dín Alí and his Son" is narrated within it. This perennially popular work can be traced back to Arabic, Persian, and Indian storytelling traditions.

Mary Shelley's ''Frankenstein'' has a deeply nested frame story structure, that features the narration of Walton, who records the narration of Victor Frankenstein, who recounts the narration of his creation, who narrates the story of a cabin dwelling family he secretly observes. Another classic novel with a frame story is ''Wuthering Heights'', the majority of which is recounted by the central family's housekeeper to a boarder. Similarly, Roald Dahl's story '' The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar'' is about a rich bachelor who finds an essay written by someone who learned to "see" playing cards from the reverse side. The full text of this essay is included in the story, and itself includes a lengthy sub-story told as a true experience by one of the essay's protagonists, Imhrat Khan.

Lewis Carroll's '' Alice'' books, ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (1865) and ''Through the Looking-Glass'' (1871), have several multiple poems that are mostly recited by several characters to the titular character. The most notable examples are " You Are Old, Father William", " 'Tis the Voice of the Lobster", "Jabberwocky", and "The Walrus and the Carpenter".

Chaucer's ''The Canterbury Tales'' and Boccaccio's ''Decameron'' are also classic frame stories. In Chaucer's ''Canterbury Tales'', the characters tell tales suited to their personalities and tell them in ways that highlight their personalities. The noble knight tells a noble story, the boring character tells a very dull tale, and the rude miller tells a smutty tale. Homer's ''Odyssey'' too makes use of this device; Odysseus' adventures at sea are all narrated by Odysseus to the court of king Alcinous in Scheria. Other shorter tales, many of them false, account for much of the ''Odyssey''. Many modern children's story collections are essentially anthology works connected by this device, such as Arnold Lobel's ''Mouse Tales'', Paula Fox's ''The Little Swineherd'', and Phillip and Hillary Sherlock's ''Ears and Tails and Common Sense''.

A well-known modern example of framing is the fantasy genre work ''The Princess Bride'' (both the book and the movie). In the movie, a grandfather is reading the story of "The Princess Bride" to his grandson. In the book, a more detailed frame story has a father editing a much longer (but fictive) work for his son, creating his own "Good Parts Version" (as the book called it) by leaving out all the parts that would bore or displease a young boy. Both the book and the movie assert that the central story is from a book called "The Princess Bride" by a nonexistent author named S. Morgenstern.

In the Welsh novel, ''Aelwyd F'Ewythr Robert'' (1852) by Gwilym Hiraethog, a visitor to a farm in north Wales tells the story of ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' to those gathered around the hearth.

Sometimes a frame story exists in the same setting as the main story. On the television series ''The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles'', each episode was framed as though it were being told by Indy when he was older (usually acted by George Hall, but once by Harrison Ford). The same device of an adult narrator representing the older version of a young protagonist is used in the films '' Stand By Me'' and ''A Christmas Story'', and the television show ''The Wonder Years'' and ''How I Met Your Mother''.

Frame stories in music

In ''The Amory Wars'', a tale told through the music of Coheed and Cambria, tells a story for the first two albums but reveals that the story is being actively written by a character called the Writer in the third. During the album, the Writer delves into his own story and kills one of the characters, much to the dismay of the main character.

The critically acclaimed Beatles album '' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'' is presented as a stage show by the fictional eponymous band, and one of its songs, "A Day in the Life" is in the form of a story within a dream. Similarly, the Fugees album '' The Score'' is presented as the soundtrack to a fictional movie, as are several other notable concept albums, while Wyclef Jean's '' The Carnival'' is presented as testimony at a trial. The majority of Ayreon's albums outline a sprawling, loosely interconnected science fiction narrative, as do the albums of Janelle Monae.

On Tom Waits's concept album, '' Alice'' (consisting of music he wrote for the musical of the same name) most of the songs are (very) loosely inspired by both ''Alice in Wonderland'' and the book's real life author, Lewis Carroll, and inspiration Alice Liddell. The song "Poor Edward," however, is presented as a story told by a narrator about Edward Mordrake, and the song "Fish and Bird" is presented as a retold story that the narrator heard from a sailor.

Examples of nested stories by type

Nested books

In his 1895 historical novel ''Pharaoh'', Bolesław Prus introduces a number of stories within the story, ranging in length from vignettes to full-blown stories, many of them drawn from ancient Egyptian texts, that further the plot, illuminate characters, and even inspire the fashioning of individual characters. Jan Potocki's ''The Manuscript Found in Saragossa'' (1797–1805) has an interlocking structure with stories-within-stories reaching several levels of depth.

The provenance of the story is sometimes explained internally, as in ''The Lord of the Rings'' by J. R. R. Tolkien, which depicts the Red Book of Westmarch (a story-internal version of the book itself) as a history compiled by several of the characters. The subtitle of ''The Hobbit'' ("There and Back Again") is depicted as part of a rejected title of this book within a book, and ''The Lord of the Rings'' is a part of the final title.

An example of an interconnected inner story is "The Mad Trist" in Edgar Allan Poe's '' Fall of the House of Usher'', where through somewhat mystical means the narrator's reading of the story within a story influences the reality of the story he has been telling, so that what happens in "The Mad Trist" begins happening in "The Fall of the House of Usher". Also, in ''Don Quixote'' by Miguel de Cervantes, there are many stories within the story that influence the hero's actions (there are others that even the author himself admits are purely digressive).
Most of the first part is presented as a translation of a found manuscript by (fictional) Cide Hamete Benengeli.

A commonly independently anthologised story is "The Grand Inquisitor" by Dostoevsky from his long psychological novel ''The Brothers Karamazov'', which is told by one brother to another to explain, in part, his view on religion and morality. It also, in a succinct way, dramatizes many of Dostoevsky's interior conflicts.

An example of a "bonus material" style inner story is the chapter "The Town Ho's Story" in Herman Melville's novel ''Moby-Dick''; that chapter tells a fully formed story of an exciting mutiny and contains many plot ideas that Melville had conceived during the early stages of writing ''Moby-Dick''—ideas originally intended to be used later in the novel—but as the writing progressed, these plot ideas eventually proved impossible to fit around the characters that Melville went on to create and develop. Instead of discarding the ideas altogether, Melville wove them into a coherent short story and had the character Ishmael demonstrate his eloquence and intelligence by telling the story to his impressed friends.

One of the most complicated structures of a story within a story was used by Vladimir Nabokov in his novel '' The Gift''. There, as inner stories, function both poems and short stories by the main character Fyodor Cherdyntsev as well as the whole Chapter IV, a critical biography of Nikolay Chernyshevsky (also written by Fyodor). This novel is considered one of the first metanovels in literature.

With the rise of literary modernism, writers experimented with ways in which multiple narratives might nest imperfectly within each other. A particularly ingenious example of nested narratives is James Merrill's 1974 modernist poem " Lost in Translation".

In Rabih Alameddine's novel ''The Hakawati'', or ''The Storyteller'', the protagonist describes coming home to the funeral of his father, one of a long line of traditional Arabic storytellers. Throughout the narrative, the author becomes hakawati (an Arabic word for a teller of traditional tales) himself, weaving the tale of the story of his own life and that of his family with folkloric versions of tales from Qur'an, the Old Testament, Ovid, and One Thousand and One Nights. Both the tales he tells of his family (going back to his grandfather) and the embedded folk tales, themselves embed other tales, often 2 or more layers deep.

In Sue Townsend's '' Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years'', Adrian writes a book entitled ''Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland'', in which the main character, Jake Westmorland, writes a book called ''Sparg of Kronk'', whose eponymous character, Sparg, writes a book with no language.

In Anthony Horowitz's '' Magpie Murders'', a significant proportion of the book features a fictional but authentically formatted mystery novel by Alan Conway, titled 'Magpie Murders'. The secondary novel ends before its conclusion returning the narrative to the original, and primary, story where the protagonist and reviewer of the book attempts to find the final chapter. As this progresses characters and messages within the fictional 'Magpie Murders' manifest themselves within the primary narrative and the final chapter's content reveals the reason for its original absence.

Dreams are a common way of including stories inside stories, and can sometimes go several levels deep. Both the book ''The Arabian Nightmare'' and the curse of "eternal waking" from the Neil Gaiman series ''The Sandman'' feature an endless series of waking from one dream into another dream. In Charles Maturin's novel ''Melmoth the Wanderer'', the use of vast stories-within-stories creates a sense of dream-like quality in the reader.

Religion and philosophy

This structure is also found in classic religious and philosophical texts. The structure of ''The Symposium'' and ''Phaedo'', attributed to Plato, is of a story within a story within a story. In the Christian Bible, the gospels are accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus. However, they also include within them the parables that Jesus told. In more modern philosophical work, Jostein Gaarder's books often feature this device. Examples are ''The Solitaire Mystery'', where the protagonist receives a small book from a baker, in which the baker tells the story of a sailor who tells the story of another sailor, and ''Sophie's World'' about a girl who is actually a character in a book that is being read by Hilde, a girl in another dimension. Later on in the book Sophie questions this idea, and realizes that Hilde too could be a character in a story that in turn is being read by another.

Mahabharata, an Indian epic also the world longest epic has a nested structure.

Nested science fiction

The experimental modernist works that incorporate multiple narratives into one story are quite often science-fiction or science fiction influenced. These include most of the various novels written by the American author Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut includes the recurring character Kilgore Trout in many of his novels. Trout acts as the mysterious science fiction writer who enhances the morals of the novels through plot descriptions of his stories. Books such as ''Breakfast of Champions'' and ''God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater'' are sprinkled with these plot descriptions. Stanisław Lem's ''Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius'' from ''The Cyberiad'' has several levels of storytelling. All levels tell stories of the same person, Trurl.

''House of Leaves'' is the tale of a man who finds a manuscript telling the story of a documentary that may or may not have ever existed, contains multiple layers of plot. The book includes footnotes and letters that tell their own stories only vaguely related to the events in the main narrative of the book, and footnotes for fake books.

Robert A. Heinlein's later books (''