Don’t want to say it yourself? Put a frame around it!

Nathaniel Hawthorne starts The Scarlet Letter with a new surveyor scrounging around in the attic of an old custom-house.

This surveyor uncovers a piece of cloth and a manuscript, and the rest of the book tells the narrative contained in the manuscript.

That story within the story is one most high school students read in American Lit, about Hester Prynne, who had to walk around with the public shame of the scarlet letter “A” sewn to her clothes due to her sin…while the person equally involved in the sin wasn’t named or shamed (but, as it turns out, was tormented by his role in the whole thing, but I won’t name him in case you haven’t yet read the book or watched the film).

What’s the technique?

The technique Hawthorne uses when he sets up the main story is called the “frame narrative.” The main story, then, becomes “the story within the story.”

The frame narrative sets up the “main” narrative.

The frame provides context and lends plausibility to the story within the story.

The nested story likely has a completely different narrator from the frame’s narrator (and the frame might also offer insight into that nested-story’s narrator).

The frame creates distance and reduces criticism of the first storyteller who sets things up. If you dislike or don’t agree with the story told, well, don’t blame the messenger. The main narrator is simply telling someone else’s the story (”Hey, this is what I heard a guy say”).

The frame narrative in action

Many well known literary pieces that use framing, including:

• The Princess Bride
• One Thousand and One Nights
• “Ozymandias”

They all use frames that set up the story or stories:

• A grandpa reads a story to his grandson, and we are swept into the rollicking story of Buttercup and Westley.
• By telling a series of cliff-hangers, Scheherazade tries to survive marriage to a king who kills his brides; we enjoy the stories she tells, as does the king depicted in the frame narrative.
• An unknown speaker shares the story told by a traveller about a broken statue discovered in the desert—it depicts a ruler who thought his works would inspire awe and fear forever but whose works and likeness now lie broken in the desert, decayed and forgotten.

A closer look at the frame narrative

Let’s look more closely at that last one, “Ozymandias.” The brevity of this short poem by Percy Byssche Shelley allows us to easily study the narrative frame.

Enjoy this rendition, recited by Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Four speakers

This poem crams into the few lines of “Ozymandias” four different speakers:

• Speaker 1: “I” (the first speaker of the poem, who creates the story’s frame of meeting a traveller and hearing about the ruined statue)
• Speaker 2: The “traveller from an antique land” (who tells the story within the story; in the version I included here, the traveller’s story is contained within quotation marks)
• Speaker 3: The “sculptor” (this speaker does not technically “speak,” though their artistic details, such as the demanding leader’s sneer, convey messages to the viewer)
• Speaker 4: Ozymandias (the leader himself—captured in a once-towering stone statue, discovered by the traveller where it lay shattered, decaying, and forgotten in a lonely stretch of desert—speaks via the words etched onto the pedestal; he thought his kingdom would last and impress mighty leaders for years to come, but there’s nothing left to see but a “colossal Wreck”)

In terms of a frame narrative technique, this short poem behaves more like a set of Russian nesting dolls, offering a new speaker every few lines, creating more and more distance, in keeping with one of its themes: the distance between this king of an “ancient” land, “Ozymandias,” and the impact he thought would last forever.

But the king and his kingdom are long forgotten in the present day of the initial speaker (“I”).

The traveller’s report

During his reign, that statue of a feared leader chiseled from stone—sneering, frowning, and mocking—must have left his subjects staring at it in awe.

Surely, they must have assumed, he is too mighty to question.

Surely, they must have thought, his works will last forever.

He might have been too mighty to question at the time, but they were wrong to assume his works would last forever. In this poem, the traveller reports complete ruin:

“Nothing beside remains.”

The traveller—narrator of the story within the story (instead of the main speaker, Speaker 1)—gets the last word, bearing witness to what they saw…or, rather, what they didn’t see: no mighty works to be found.

Nothing at all remained to cause a person to despair.

Let someone else say the bold thing

The frame narrative’s speaker says the bold thing by letting someone else say the bold thing. In this case, the frame narrator delegates to the traveller the task of testifying to the decay of the great and mighty leader’s reign, and to the lone and level sands that stretch far away.

The frame narrative can work with fiction, with nonfiction, and, as we saw, with poetry.

Try the frame narrative yourself to add distance from topics that matter to you. It’s a way of telling it slant. Invent one or both narrators, and create the story that sets up the nested story.

You can say the bold thing by letting someone else say the bold thing.

Let me know how it goes.

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