Framing device
The term framing device refers to the narrational justification why a story within a story is being told.[1]
The perhaps most common example of this device is the frame story. Familiar examples of this include the Arabian Nights where Scheherazade must narrate stories in order to prevent her execution, Boccaccio's Decameron where young people run away from Florence to avoid the plague pass the time telling stories, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in which the host at the inn charges the travelers with each providing a tale.
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Use in narrative [edit]
Framing devices are very common in storytelling. They are often employed to hold a story together and provide context, to create interest, to provide resolution and/or to move a story along.
Suspense creating framing devices [edit]
A classical example of this technique was used in the Arabian Nights tale "The Three Apples", which begins with the discovery of a young woman's dead body; after the murderer later reveals himself, he narrates his reasons for the murder as a flashback of events leading up to the discovery of her dead body at the beginning of the story.[2]
A framing device is also used in the 1997 disaster romance film Titanic, where Old Rose tells a modern day treasure hunter her story of love and loss on the RMS Titanic.
A framing device of this kind may also be a scene or event that is slowly explained over the course of the main narrative. An example of this can be seen in the 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire (adapted from the 2005 novel Q & A), where the protagonist Jamal comes close to winning Kaun Banega Crorepati (the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?) and is then accused of cheating. The film begins with an interrogation at a police station serving as a framing device, where Jamal narrates how he answered the questions correctly by relating them to flashbacks of his own life.
In the 2010 film The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg testifies in the deposition of two Facebook-related lawsuits. The framing device gives perspective and narration to the flashback storyline beginning in 2003.
Structuring framing devices [edit]
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle often structured his detective stories in frames. The crime was reported, Sherlock Holmes solved the crime, and then he explained the solution to Dr. Watson. Thus the reader gets three looks at the same event.
References [edit]
- ^ http://books.google.se/books?id=tIXwrduoDMoC&pg=PA216&dq=%22framing+device%22&hl=nl&sa=X&ei=kOzBUNDHLoqB4gSH94GwBw&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22framing%20device%22&f=false under heading "Play within a play"
- ^ Pinault, David (1992), Story-Telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights, Brill Publishers, p. 94, ISBN 90-04-09530-6
