Survey of World Literature

Ovid, Giovanni Boccaccio, and the authors of One Thousand and One Nights use frame narratives to add continuity and structure to the literary composition. Framing serves several literary functions. For one, framing establishes an independent narrator. The reader comes to trust and relate to this narrator, who is fictional and yet not quite a character of any of the internal narratives. This also allows the authors of their respective stories to remain independent, while still offering a "voice," broad omniscient analysis, or general commentary on the work contained therein. The narrator can therefore be viewed as a surrogate for the author's voice in an attempt to remain external to the work. The frame narrative therefore has a critical role to play in the evolution of fiction, novels, and narrative.

A second important literary function of framing is that it allows the author to string together otherwise disparate stories, linking them together like pearls on a necklace rather than compiling them haphazardly into a collection of short stories. Characters can vanish, only to resurface later in a completely different context. In One Thousand and One Nights, there is little specific continuity. Their different authorship and cultural background precludes the type of narrative continuity that exists either in Ovid's Metamorphoses or in Boccaccio's The Decameron. Continuities that exist within the frame narrative of One Thousand and One Nights are thematic and symbolic. The frame allows Scheherazade to interject context.

Given that One Thousand and One Nights has no central author complicates the concept of frame narrative, yet their editors frame these tales. This raises the third component of frame narration: cultural and historical context. In One Thousand and One Nights, especially, framing serves the distinct purpose of revealing the cultural and historical context of the stories. The stories contained in the collection were amassed over time, and via trade with geographically and culturally disparate societies. The frame narrative shows continuities and intersections between these cultures, which became unified under the rubric of literature. The unification of literary culture under a common Arabic rubric suggests to the reader the evolution of Central Asian and West Asian culture.

Finally, frame narratives provide an almost cosmological structure to the stories. The alpha-omega/beginning-end structure is like a snake eating its tail. With a place of beginning, a starting point, the reader is led through a maze of interwoven characters themes, plots, symbols, and ideas. Occasionally the reader gets lost and forgets that there is a broader purpose, until, that is, the framing finishes and the reader has a sense of finality and closure.

In The Metamorphoses, Ovid uses the frame to first establish the central theme of the tome. "Man looks aloft; and with erected eyes / Beholds his own hereditary skies. / From such rude principles our form began; / And earth was metamorphos'd into Man." Presenting the theme of metamorphosis as a spiritual entreaty or invocation links Ovid to classical Greek drama, while also presenting to the reader the tone of the tales the narrator is about to tell. Setting the stage for stories about love and romance, death and war, Ovid asks the reader to interpret these tales through the frame of transformation and change. The author can remain as didactic as he wishes, because he hides behind the framing narrative. Readers can much more easily forgive the presence of the author intruding on the story when the author unself-consciously metamorphoses into the narrator in the frame.

In The Decameron, framing serves an even more direct function than it does in Ovid's Metamorphoses. In Boccaccio's The Decameron, the frame narrative provides a historical context that is much appreciated by modern readers who might not otherwise understand the motives of some of the central characters. More importantly, the frame narrative introduces the narrator unequivocally as a character. Boccaccio is more detached from The Decameron than Ovid is from The Metamorphoses. Being holed up in a farm during the "late mortal pestilence," the seven ladies and three men who weave the tales seek "in some measure to compensate the injustice of Fortune," (Proem 013). Using poignant symbolism, the author is sure to make a reference to the spinning wheel: for spinning tales is akin to spinning yarn. The frame narrative in The Decameron, the title of which refers to the ten tales told by the men and women, heralds the function of storytelling as being a salve for the soul. Therefore, frame narratives inherently celebrate the act of storytelling.