Story within a story

Stories within stories can be used simply to enhance entertainment for the reader or viewer, or can act as examples to teach lessons to other characters.^[2] 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.^[3] 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.^[2]


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, and could either be skipped or stand separately, although many subtle connections may be lost. 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).

Fractal fiction[edit]

Some stories feature what might be called a literary version of the Droste effect, where an image contains a smaller version of itself (also a common feature in many fractals). An early version is found in an ancient Chinese proverb, in which an old monk situated in a temple found on a high mountain recursively tells the same story to a younger monk about an old monk who tells a younger monk a story regarding an old monk sitting in a temple located on a high mountain, and so on.^[25] The same concept is at the heart of Michael Ende's classic children's novel The Neverending Story, which prominently features a book of the same title. This is later revealed to be the same book the audience is reading, when it begins to be retold again from the beginning, thus creating an infinite regression that features as a plot element. Another story that includes versions of itself is Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Worlds' End which contains several instances of multiple storytelling levels, including Cerements (issue #55) where one of the inmost levels corresponds to one of the outer levels, turning the story-within-a-story structure into an infinite regression. Jesse Ball's The Way Through Doors features a deeply nested set of stories within stories, most of which explore alternate versions of the main characters. The frame device is that the main character is telling stories to a woman in a coma (similar to Almodóvar's Talk to Her, mentioned above).


Richard Adams' classic Watership Down includes several memorable tales about the legendary prince of rabbits, El-Ahraira, as told by master storyteller, Dandelion.


Samuel Delany's great surrealist sci-fi classic Dhalgren features the main character discovering a diary apparently written by a version of himself, with incidents that usually reflect, but sometimes contrast with the main narrative. The last section of the book is taken up entirely by journal entries, about which readers must choose whether to take as completing the narrator's own story. Similarly, in Kiese Laymon's Long Division, the main character discovers a book, also called Long Division, featuring what appears to be himself, except as living twenty years earlier. The title book in Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe exists within itself as a stable creation of a closed loop in time. Likewise, in the Will Ferrell comedy Stranger than Fiction the main character discovers he is a character in a book that (along with its author) also exists in the same universe. The 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter includes a narrative between Achilles and the Tortoise (characters borrowed from Lewis Carroll, who in turn borrowed them from Zeno), and within this story they find the book "Provocative Adventures of Achilles and the Tortoise Taking Place in Sundry Spots of the Globe", which they begin to read, the Tortoise taking the part of the Tortoise, and Achilles taking the part of Achilles. Within this self-referential narrative, the two characters find the book "Provocative Adventures of Achilles and the Tortoise Taking Place in Sundry Spots of the Globe", which they begin to read, this time each taking the other's part. The 1979 experimental novel If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino follows a reader, addressed in the second person, trying to read the very same book, but being interrupted by ten other recursively nested incomplete stories.


Robert Altman's satirical Hollywood noir The Player ends with the antihero being pitched a movie version of his own story, complete with an unlikely happy ending. The long-running musical A Chorus Line dramatizes its own creation, and the life stories of its own original cast members. The famous final number does double duty as the showstopper for both the musical the audience is watching and the one the characters are appearing in. Austin Powers in Goldmember begins with an action film opening, which turns out to be a sequence being filmed by Steven Spielberg. Near the ending, the events of the film itself are revealed to be a movie being enjoyed by the characters. Jim Henson's The Muppet Movie is framed as a screening of the movie itself, and the screenplay for the movie is present inside the movie, which ends with an abstracted, abbreviated re-staging of its own events. The 1985 Tim Burton film Pee-Wee's Big Adventure ends with the main characters watching a film version of their own adventures, but as reimagined as a Hollywood blockbuster action film, with James Brolin as a more stereotypically manly version of the Paul Reubens title character. Episode 14 of the anime series Martian Successor Nadesico is essentially a clip show, but has several newly animated segments based on Gekigangar III, an anime that exists within its universe and that many characters are fans of, that involves the characters of that show watching Nadesico. The episode ends with the crew of the Nadesico watching the very same episode of Gekigangar, causing a paradox. Mel Brooks's 1974 comedy Blazing Saddles leaves its Western setting when the climactic fight scene breaks out, revealing the setting to have been a set in the Warner Bros. studio lot; the fight spills out onto an adjacent musical set, then into the studio canteen, and finally onto the streets. The two protagonists arrive at Grauman's Chinese Theatre, which is showing the "premiere" of Blazing Saddles; they enter the cinema to watch the conclusion of their own film. Brooks recycled the gag in his 1987 Star Wars parody, Spaceballs, where the villains are able to locate the heroes by watching a copy of the movie they are in on VHS video tape (a comic exaggeration of the phenomenon of films being available on video before their theatrical release). Brooks also made the 1976 parody Silent Movie about a buffoonish team of filmmakers trying to make the first Hollywood silent film in forty years—which is essentially that film itself (another forty years later, life imitated art imitating art, when an actual modern silent movie became a hit, the Oscar winnerThe Artist).


The film-within-a-film format is used in the Scream horror series. In Scream 2, the opening scene takes place in a movie theater where a screening of Stab is played which depicts the events from the first film. In between the events of Scream 2 and Scream 3, a second film was released called Stab 2. Scream 3 is about the actors filming a fictional third installment in the Stab series. The actors playing the trilogy's characters end up getting killed, much in the same way as the characters they are playing on screen and in the same order. In between the events of Scream 3 and Scream 4, four other Stab films are released. In the opening sequence of Scream 4 two characters are watching Stab 7 before they get killed. There's also a party in which all seven Stab movies were going to be shown. References are also made to Stab 5 involving time travel as a plot device. In the fifth installment of the series, also named Scream, an eighth Stab film is mentioned having been released before the film takes place. The characters in the film, several of which are fans of the series, heavily criticize the film, similar to how Scream 4 was criticized. Additionally, late in the film, Mindy watches the first Stab by herself. During the depiction of Ghostface sneaking up behind Randy on the couch from the first film in Stab, Ghostface sneaks up on Mindy and attacks and stabs her.


Director Spike Jonze's Adaptation is a fictionalized version of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's struggles to adapt the non-cinematic book The Orchid Thief into a Hollywood blockbuster. As his onscreen self succumbs to the temptation to commercialize the narrative, Kaufman incorporates those techniques into the script, including tropes such as an invented romance, a car chase, a drug-running sequence, and an imaginary identical twin for the protagonist. (The movie also features scenes about the making of Being John Malkovich, previously written by Kaufman and directed by Jonze.) Similarly, in Kaufman's self-directed 2008 film Synecdoche, New York, the main character Caden Cotard is a skilled director of plays who receives a grant, and ends up creating a remarkable theater piece intended as a carbon copy of the outside world. The layers of copies of the world ends up several layers deep. The same conceit was previously used by frequent Kaufman collaborator Michel Gondry in his music video for the Björk song "Bachelorette," which features a musical that is about, in part, the creation of that musical. A mini-theater and small audience appear on stage to watch the musical-within-a-musical, and at some point, within that second musical a yet-smaller theater and audience appear.


Fractal fiction is sometimes utilized in video games to play with the concept of player choice: In the first chapter of Stories Untold, the player is required to play a text adventure, which eventually becomes apparent to be happening in the same environment the player is in; in Superhot the narrative itself is constructed around the player playing a game called Superhot.