What Is a Frame Story? | Definition & Examples
- Melchior Antoine
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
Stories often become more interesting by leaning on context and scope, and this is what a frame story does. So what exactly is it? A frame story is a wider narrative that provides a framework for another story or a set of stories.
In this storytelling technique, the main narrative is used as a backdrop for the other story, providing much-needed context. Famous examples of frame stories include the Trojan War, which is the backdrop of several works of classical literature, such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.
Other examples include The Thousand and One Nights and The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer. In The Thousand and One Nights, the frame story is that of Scheherazade, who avoids being killed by her husband by telling him a story every night and leaving it incomplete.
In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387–1400) , the frame of the story is a Christian pilgrimage, which brings together several storytellers, who go on to tell dramatic stories starring themselves. In this article, we discuss how frame stories work using examples from Homer and the movie War of the Worlds (2005).
The importance of a frame story
Frame stories help give context to a narrative, and they also help explain the plot of a movie. The best frame stories can be as interesting or even more interesting than the narrative that we are following. Let’s begin with the example of the movie War of the Worlds (2005). It is a movie directed by Stephen Spielberg, which in turn was based on H. G. Wells’ 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds.
In the movie, the main character, Ray Ferrier, has to protect his family from an alien invasion. However, the hero of the day is not Ray, but rather germs, which the aliens get infected with and die because they have not developed immunity, unlike humans.
The movie has been criticized for its deus ex machina approach to storytelling. This describes when the cn\entral conflict of a story is solved by something or someone else besides the protagonist. However, the way in which the movie uses the frame story could help save it from this criticism.
The alien invasion is the wider narrative or frame story, whereas the inner story is about Ray getting his family to safety by reuniting them with their mother. We get to see the fraught relationship between him and his son and how that is eventually resolved. In addition, we also see him execute a mini-rescue of sorts that saves his daughter and several others from an alien spaceship. much-needed
More importantly, we get to see Ray’s character arc, where he grows from an irresponsible dad who is afraid to take full responsibility to a mature man who successfully protects his kids from danger and brings them home. So even if the movie’s central conflict isn’t solved by the protagonist, we see a protagonist go through a successful narrative arc and positive character arc of transformation.
The Trojan War: The mother of frame stories
Most of the most popular frame stories are related to traditional oral storytelling. Epics such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, which rely on the frame of the Trojan War, are oral poetic traditions. The Thousand and One Nights is also a traditional folktale from Persia.
Let’s look at the Trojan War as a frame story. This tale has inspired works of literature throughout ancient, medieval, and modern history. We have the story of the Iliad, which tells part of the tale of the Trojan War, namely how the hero Achilles had a falling out with Agamemnon over a girl, and allowed the Trojans to triumph in battle for a while by withdrawing. His best friend Patroclus convinces him to allow him to borrow his armour to fight the Trojans, which results in him being slain by Hector, who is in turn slain by Achilles in revenge.
There is also the tale of the Odyssey, which tells the story of another Greek hero, Odysseus, who spent 10 years trying to get back home after the end of the Trojan War. The prologue of the tale begins thus:
TELL ME, O MUSE, of that ingenious hero who traveled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home; but do what he might he could not save his men, for they perished through their own sheer folly in eating the cattle of the Sun-god Apollo; so the god prevented them from ever reaching home.
It doesn’t just stop there. Modernist literature has been inspired in turn by the Odyssey to come up with its own interpretations of the tale, such as Pound's Canto I, which begins with an interpretation of the Odyssey. Other examples include James Joyce’s Ulysses, which elevates the quotidian lives of Dubliners into something grand by comparing it to the Odyssey in a mock epic. There’s also H.D.’s Penelope poem, which represents a feminist perspective of Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, as she waits for him.
But we need not take the leap into the modern period. The Greek and Roman writers were inspired to create several works of great literature from the Trojan War. This includes the Orestia, which tells how Agamemnon, a Greek hero who participated in the war, was murdered by his wife and jealous lover and how his son took revenge on his behalf. The Aeneid is an epic written by the Roman poet Virgil about the Trojan hero Aeneas, who escapes after the fall of Troy to Italy, where he becomes the ancestor of the Romans.
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However, the Trojan War did not just give birth to narratives that only occurred during and after the war. The poem ‘Leda and the Swan” by Yeats, which was published in 1923, describes the violent rape of Leda, mother of Helen of Troy, whose abduction from the Spartan king Menelaus led to the sack of Troy. In two lines, it describes or pseudo-predicts the sack of Troy and the death of Agamemnon:
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Yeats here is portraying the event that gave birth to Helen, and by extension, the death and destruction of both Trojan and Greek cultures. Namely, the rape of Leda, Helen’s mother, by the king of the Gods, Zeus, who disguises himself as a swan.
This is a deliberate choice by Yeats. Some interpretations of the myth suggest that the sexual encounter between Leda and Zeus was consensual. Yeats chooses to portray it as violent because he wants to use the tale as a frame story to make a point. The poet frames the Trojan War and all its violence and tragedy as a consequence of a mortal being brutally raped by a capricious god, showing that human destiny is often the victim of cruel and unjust fate.
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2025, November 19). What Is a Frame Story? | Definition & Examples. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/frame-story |
