The Frame Narrative Form - Essay Example

This frame sets up an expectation that the stories will be entertaining, because they should serve two purposes: to distract the listeners from the awful events of the plague and to keep them amused as the time passes and they have no other activities to occupy them. The opening story starts with a long prologue emphasizing the proper devotion that is owed “the maker of all things” (Boccaccio, in Lawall, 2002, p. 1965). The first storyteller, Panfilo, addresses his tale to the women of the group, and makes a great show of presenting his story as an encouragement to trust in God instead of dwelling on the “ troubles, trials and tribulations” (Boccaccio, in Lawall, 2002, p. 1965). The plague provides a necessary backdrop which allows respectable men and women to come together and tell their tales about some of the great themes of human existence: life, death, faith in God, despair and of course the whole domain of sexual customs and behavior.

The stories are quite daring in their subject matter, and Boccaccio uses the frame of the plague and its consequences to make it acceptable for such racy tales to be shared between this group of people. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is also a loose collection of stories, but in this case the frame is written as if from the position of a person out of time and space. It is not so realistically anchored in a particular time, and indeed the narrator says “may/the song I sing be seamless as its way/weaves from the world’s beginning to our day” (Ovid, in Lawall, 2002, p. 1138), as if his material covers all of human history.

This style reminds the listener of the omniscient narrator of the epic genre, who interprets the meanings of human actions from the perspective of a neutral observer. In this case the frame is not so closely connected to the content of the stories, but rather it creates a certain lofty mood, which gives the stories greater moral seriousness. The linking element in this work is not a historical context, with specific individuals in a certain time and place, but rather it is a theoretical concept, namely that of change.

This makes the frame more like an abstract academic theory than a part of the storytelling, and so it is not as effective, nor indeed as necessary to an understanding of the stories, as the frame that Boccaccio uses. The frame that is used in the Thousand and one nights is perhaps the most famous frame in all of literary history. It is an ingenious invention, creating an element of tension and excitement as the reader or listener wonders whether each story will be sufficiently exciting to keep the King from carrying out his threat to kill Scheherazade.

The important point about this frame, is that it is in itself also a kind of story. It creates a layered storytelling experience, and it is very much bound up with the content of each tale, because Scheherazade has to find ways to link the end of each tale with the beginning of the next. She repeats like a chorus every morning some statement along the lines of “Tomorrow night I shall tell you something even better, stranger, and more wonderful, if I live, the Almighty God willing” (Lawall, 2002, p.158). This promise, and the king’s desire to find out what happens next, bind the stories together