A story within a story, also rendered story-within-a-story, is a literary device in which one narrative is presented during the action of another narrative. 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). A story within a story can be used in novels, short stories, plays, television programs, films, poems, songs, and philosophical essays.
Contents |
Stories within stories can be of these types:
Sometimes with type 2, someone completes the inner story in the real world: see #From story within a story to separate story.
The inner stories are told either simply to entertain or more usually to act as an example to the other characters. In either case the story often has 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.
The literary device of stories within a story dates back to a device known as a frame story, when the outer story does not have much matter, and most of the bulk of the work consists of one or more complete stories told by one or more storytellers. This concept can be found in ancient Indian literature, such as the epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, Vishnu Sarma's Panchatantra, Syntipas' Seven Wise Masters, the Hitopadesha, and Vikram and the Vampire. Another early example of stories within a story can be found in the One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights), which can be traced back to Arabic, Persian, and Indian storytelling traditions. Homer's Odyssey too makes use of this device; Odysseus' adventures at sea are all narrated by the hero himself to the court of king Alcinous in Scheria. Other shorter tales, many of them false, account for much of the Odyssey.
Often the stories within a story are used to satirize views, not only in the outer story but also in the real world. The Itchy & Scratchy Show from The Simpsons and Terrance & Phillip from South Park both comment on the levels of violence and acceptable behaviour in the media and allow criticism of the outer cartoon to be addressed in the cartoon itself.
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 his 1895 historical novel Pharaoh, Bolesław Prus introduces a number of stories-within-the-story, ranging in length from vignette to full-blown story, many of them drawn from ancient Egyptian texts, that further the plot, illuminate characters, and even inspire the fashioning of individual characters.
The provenance of the story is sometimes explained internally, as in The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, which depicts the Red Book of Westmarch (a story-internal version of the book itself) as a history compiled by several of the characters. The subtitles of The Hobbit (There and Back Again) is depicted as part of a rejected title of this book-within-a-book, and The Lord of the Rings is a part of the final title.[1]
When a story is told within another, rather than 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. In Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, the characters tell tales suited to their personalities and tell them in ways that highlight their personalities. The noble knight tells a noble story, the boring character tells a very dull tale and the rude miller tells a smutty tale.
In some cases, the story within a story is involved in the action of the plot of the outer story. An example is "The Mad Trist" in Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, where through somewhat mystical means the narrator's reading of the story-within-a-story influences the reality of the story he has been telling, so that what happens in "the Mad Trist" begins happening in "The Fall of the House of Usher". Also, in Don Quixote by Cervantes, there are many stories within the story that influence the hero's actions (there are others that even the author himself admits are purely digressive).
An inner story is often independent so that it can either be skipped over or read separately, although many subtle connections may be lost. A commonly anthologised story is The Grand Inquisitor by Dostoevsky from his long psychological novel The Brothers Karamazov and is told by one brother to another to explain, in part, his view on religion and morality. It also, in a succinct way, dramatizes many of Dostoevsky's interior conflicts.
Sometimes, the inner story serves as an outlet for discarded ideas that the author deemed to be of too much merit to leave out completely, something that is somewhat analogous to the inclusion of deleted scenes with DVD releases of films. An example of this is the chapter The Town Ho's Story from Herman Melville's famous novel Moby-Dick, which tells a fully formed story of an exciting mutiny. This inner story contains many plot ideas that Melville had conceived during the early stages of writing Moby Dick, ideas that were originally intended to be used later on in the novel, but as writing progressed these plot ideas eventually proved impossible to fit around the characters that Melville went on to create and develop. Instead of discarding these ideas altogether, Melville instead weaved them into a coherent short story and had the character Ishmael demonstrate his eloquence and intelligence by telling the story to his impressed friends. Arthur Ransome uses the device to allow his young characters in the Swallows and Amazons series of children's books, plotted in the recognisable, everyday world, to take part in fantastic adventures of piracy in distant lands: two books from the twelve: Peter Duck and Missee Lee (and some would include Great Northern? as a third) are adventures supposedly made up by the characters themselves.[2]
With the rise of literary modernism, writers experimented with ways in which multiple narratives might nest imperfectly within each other. A particularly ingenious example of nested narratives is James Merrill's 1974 modernist poem "Lost in Translation".
Other prime examples of experimental modernist literature that incorporate multiple narratives into one story are various novels written by American author Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut includes the recurring character Kilgore Trout in many of his novels. Trout acts as the mysterious science fiction writer who enhances the moral of the novel through plot descriptions of his stories. Books such as Breakfast of Champions and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater are sprinkled with these plot descriptions.
Robert A. Heinlein's later books (The Number of the Beast, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and To Sail Beyond the Sunset) propose the idea that every real universe is a fiction in another Universe. This hypothesis enables many writer who are characters in the books to interact with their own creations.
The Amory Wars, the story told through the music of Coheed and Cambria, tells a story for the first two albums but reveals that the story is being actively written by a character called the Writer in the third. During the album, the Writer delves into his own story and kills one of the characters, much to the dismay of the main character.
Several Star Trek tales are stories or events within stories, such as Gene Roddenberry's novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, J. A. Lawrence's Mudd's Angels, John M. Ford's The Final Reflection, Margaret Wander Bonanno's Strangers from the Sky (which adopts the conceit that it is book from the future by an author called Gen Jaramet-Sauner), and J.R. Rasmussen's "Research" in the anthology Star Trek: Strange New Worlds II. Steven Barnes's novelization of "Far Beyond the Stars" partners with Greg Cox's The Eugenics Wars: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh (Volume Two) to tell us that the story "Far Beyond the Stars" — and, by extension, all of Star Trek itself — is the creation of 1950s writer Benny Russell.
The Quantum Leap novel Knights Of The Morningstar also features a character who writes a book by that name.
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon has several characters seeing a play called 'The Courier's Tragedy' by the fictitious Jacobean playwright Richard Wharfinger. The events of the play broadly mirror those of the novel and give the main character, Oedipa, a greater context with which to consider her predicament; the play concerns a feud between two rival mail distribution companies, which appears to be on-going to the present day, and in which, if this is the case, Oedipa has found herself involved. As in Hamlet, the director makes changes to the original script; in this instance, a couplet that was added, possibly by religious zealots intent on giving the play extra moral gravity, are said only on the night that Oedipa sees the play. From what Pynchon tells us, this is the only mention in the play of Thurn and Taxis' rivals' name - Trystero - and it is the seed for the conspiracy that unfurls.
A variant of this device is a flashback within a flashback, which was introduced by the Japanese film Rashomon (1950), based on the Japanese novel In a Grove (1921). The story unfolds in flashback as the four witnesses in the story—the bandit, the murdered samurai, his wife, and the nameless woodcutter—recount the events of one afternoon in a grove. But it is also a flashback within a flashback, because the accounts of the witnesses are being retold by a woodcutter and a priest to a ribald commoner as they wait out a rainstorm in a ruined gatehouse.
The story "The Three Brothers" was in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and its film adaptation. The story was later included in the book The Tales of Beedle the Bard.
Some stories may include within themselves a story within a story, or even more than two layers.
This literary device also dates back to ancient Sanskrit literature. In Vishnu Sarma's Panchatantra, an inter-woven series of colorful animal tales are told with one narrative opening within another, sometimes three or four layers deep, and then unexpectedly snapping shut in irregular rhythms to sustain attention. In Ugrasrava's epic Mahabharata, the Kurukshetra War is narrated by a character in Vyasa's Jaya, which itself is narrated by a character in Vaisampayana's Bharata, which itself is narrated by a character in Ugrasrava's Mahabharata.
The structure of The Symposium and Phaedo, attributed to Plato, is of a story within a story within a story.
Another early example is the One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights), where the general story is narrated by an unknown narrator, and in this narration the stories are told by Scheherazade. In many of Scheherazade's narrations there are also stories narrated, and even in some of these, there are some other stories.[3] An example of this includes the "Sinbad the Sailor" story narrated by Scheherazade. Within the story itself, the protagonist Sinbad the Sailor narrates the stories of his seven voyages to Sinbad the Porter. Another example is "The Three Apples", a murder mystery narrated by Scheherazade. Within the story itself, after the murderer reveals himself, he narrates his reasons for the murder as a flashback of events leading up to the murder. Within this flashback, an unreliable narrator tells a story to mislead the would-be murderer, who later discovers that he was misled after another character narrates the truth to him.[4] As the story concludes, the "Tale of Núr al-Dín Alí and his Son" is narrated within it. In yet another tale Scheherazade narrates, "The Fisherman and the Jinni", the "Tale of the Wazir and the Sage Duban" is narrated within it, and within that there are three more tales narrated.
Jan Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1797-1805) has extremely rich interlocking structure with stories-within-stories reaching several levels of depth.
Plays such as I Hate Hamlet or movies such as A Midwinter's Tale are about a production of Hamlet, which in turn includes a production of The Murder of Gonzago (or The Mouse-trap), so we have a story (The Murder of Gonzago) within a story (Hamlet) within a story (A Midwinter's Tale).
At least one line in the C. S. Lewis book The Last Battle implies that Lewis learned of Narnia's events - and thus wrote the Narnia books - after the Railway Accident in 1949, when Susan told him the stories in the belief that she was relating mere childhood make-believe. Further still, The Silver Chair states that a Narnian author wrote a book called The Horse And His Boy after the events related in the novel.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein at one point features the narration of an Arctic explorer, who records the narration of Victor Frankenstein, who recounts the narration of his creation, who narrates the story of a cabin dwelling family he secretly observes.
Margaret Atwood's novel The Blind Assassin also uses this technique. The novel's expository narration is interspersed with excerpts from a novel written by one of the main characters; the novel-within-a-novel itself contains a science fiction story written by one of that novel's characters.
Stanisław Lem's Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius from The Cyberiad has several levels of storytelling. Interestingly, all levels tell stories of the same person, Trurl.
House of Leaves, the tale of a man who finds a manuscript telling the story of a documentary that may or may not have ever existed, contains multiple layers of plot. The book even includes footnotes and letters that tell their own stories only vaguely related to the events in the main narrative of the book, and even includes footnotes for fake books. In addition, the fact that portions of the book were released through the internet and purported to be true added an even higher level to the cult following surrounding this book.
The Simpsons parodied this structure with numerous 'layers' of sub-stories in the Season 17 episode "The Seemingly Never-Ending Story".
Neil Gaiman's influential graphic novel series The Sandman includes several examples of this device. Worlds' End, volume 8 of the series, contains several instances of multiple storytelling levels, including Cerements (issue #55) where one of the inmost levels actually corresponds to one of the outer levels, turning the story-within-a-story structure into an infinite regression.
In the beginning of the music video for the Michael Jackson song "Thriller", the heroine is terrorized by her monster boyfriend in what turns out to be a movie within a dream.
Roald Dahl's story The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is about a rich bachelor who finds an essay written by someone who learnt to "see" playing cards from the reverse side. The full text of this essay is included in the story, and itself includes a lengthy sub-story told as a true experience by one of the essay's protagonists, Imhrat Khan.
The music video for the Björk song "Bachelorette" 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.
Episode 14 of the anime series Martian Successor Nadesico causes a rather confusing link between the world of the show itself and that of Gekigangar III, a popular anime that exists within its universe and that many characters are fans of; the episode is essentially a clip show, but has several newly animated segments based on Gekigangar that involves the characters of that show watching Nadesico (many of them being big fans of it themselves). The episode ends with the crew of the Nadesico watching the very same episode of Gekigangar, causing a bizarre paradox of sorts.
Since Nadesico, other anime series have featured shows-within-a-show; the most famous examples are Densha Otoko, which had the series Getsumen To Heiki Mina and Genshiken, which had Kujibiki Unbalance. Both sub-shows have since become actual series in their own right, though three episodes of Kujibiki Unbalance were created as OVAs to coincide with the release of Genshiken. The episodes were styled as if they were part of a serial, though they were actually one-offs. There is also a Kujibiki Unbalance manga, being translated and published by Del Rey/Tanoshimi.
Jostein Gaarder's books often feature this device. Examples are The Solitaire Mystery, where the protagonist receives a small book from a baker, in which the baker tells the story of a sailor who tells the story of another sailor, and Sophie's World about a girl who is actually a character in a book that is being read by Hilde, a girl in another dimension. Later on in the book Sophie questions this idea, and realizes that Hilde too could be a character in a story that in turn is being read by another.
The popular graphic novel Watchmen features a story within a story called Tales of the Black Freighter, which details that man's insanity comes from fear of losing something, and parallels a character in the main story and hints at his actions.
Daniel Handler's introduction in Lemony Snicket's Unauthorized Autobiography continually introduces a new story about a page into the previous one, thus creating a confusing and inconsequential (but not incorrect or self-contradictory) storyline that is never finished, always dealing with the questions he is asked but never answering them. He drops a hint in one of the layers that this is simply a technique to distract the reader from the fact that he never answers these questions.
Best New Horror, a short story from the book 20th Century Ghosts, has the main character reading a horror tale called Button Boy.
Catheryne Valente's duology, "The Orphan's Tales" featured strong influences from 1001 Arabian Nights, with stories nestled within stories - sometimes up to more than seven layers.
This dramatic device was probably first used by Thomas Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy around 1587, where the play is presented before an audience of two of the characters, who comment upon the action.[5] From references in other contemporary works, Kyd is also assumed to have been the writer of an early, lost version of Hamlet (the so-called Ur-Hamlet), with a play-within-a-play interlude.[6]
William Shakespeare used this device in many of his plays, including A Midsummer Night's Dream, Love's Labours Lost, and Hamlet. In Hamlet the prince, Hamlet himself, asks some strolling players to perform the Murder of Gonzago. The action and characters in The Murder mirror the murder of Hamlet's father in the main action, and Prince Hamlet writes additional material to emphasize this. Hamlet wishes to provoke the murderer, his uncle, and sums this up by saying "the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king." Hamlet calls this new play The Mouse-trap (a title that Agatha Christie later took for the long-running play The Mousetrap). In the Hamlet-based film Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead the players even feature a third-level puppet theatre version within their play. Almost the whole of The Taming of the Shrew is a play-within-a-play, presented to convince Christopher Sly, a drunken tinker, that he is a nobleman watching a private performance, but the device has no relevance to the plot (unless Katharina's subservience to her "lord" in the last scene is intended to strengthen the deception against the tinker[7]) and is often dropped in modern productions. Pericles draws in part on the 14th century Confessio Amantis (itself a frame story) by John Gower and Shakespeare has the ghost of Gower "assume man's infirmities" to introduce his work to the contemporary audience and comment on the action of the play.[8]
In Anton Chekhov's The Seagull there are specific allusions to Hamlet: in the first act a son stages a play to impress his mother, a professional actress, and her new lover; the mother responds by comparing her son to Hamlet. Later he tries to come between them, as Hamlet had done with his mother and her new husband. The tragic developments in the plot follow in part from the scorn the mother shows for her son's play.[9]
The opera Pagliacci is about a troupe of actors who perform a play about marital infidelity that mirrors their own lives. And John Adams' Nixon in China (1985-7) features a surreal version of Madam Mao's Red Detachment of Women to extraordinary effect, illuminating the ascendence of human values over the disillusionment of high politics in the meeting.
In Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, a play is staged as a parable to villagers in the Soviet Union to justify the re-allocation of their farmland: the tale describes how a child is awarded to a servant-girl rather than its natural mother, an aristocrat, as the woman most likely to care for it well. This kind of play-within-a-play, which appears at the beginning of the main play and acts as a 'frame' for it, is called an 'induction'. Brecht's one-act play The Elephant Calf (1926) is a play-within-a-play performed in the foyer of the theatre during his Man Equals Man.
In Jean Giraudoux's play Ondine, all of act two is a series of scenes within scenes, sometimes two levels deep. This increases the dramatic tension and also makes more poignant the inevitable failure of the relationship between the mortal Hans and water sprite Ondine.
The Two-Character Play by Tennessee Williams has a concurrent double plot with the convention of a play within a play. Felice and Clare are siblings and are both actor/producers touring ‘The Two-Character Play.’ They have supposedly been abandoned by their crew and have been left to put on the play by themselves. The characters in the play are also brother and sister and are also named Clare and Felice.
The Mysteries, a modern reworking of the mediaeval mystery plays, remains faithful to its roots by having the modern actors play the sincere, naïve tradesmen and women as they take part in the original performances.
The musical Kiss Me, Kate is about the production of a fictitious musical, The Taming of the Shrew, based on the Shakespeare play of the same name, and features several scenes from it. Alternatively, a play might be about the production of a play, and include the performance of all or part of the play, as in Noises Off, Les feluettes or The Producers.
In most stagings of the musical Cats, which include the song "Growltiger's Last Stand" — a recollection of an old play by Gus the Theatre Cat — the character of Lady Griddlebone sings "The Ballad of Billy McCaw". (However, many productions of the show omit "Growltiger's Last Stand", and "The Ballad of Billy McCaw" has at times been replaced with a mock aria, so this metastory isn't always seen.) Depending on the production, there is another musical scene called The Awful Battle of the Pekes and the Pollices where the Jellicles put on a show for their leader. In Lestat: The Musical, there are three play within a plays. First, when Lestat visits his childhood friend, Nicolas, who works in a theater, where he discovers his love for theater; and two more when the Theater of the Vampires perform. One is used as a plot mechanism to explain the vampire god, Marius, which sparks an interest in Lestat to find him.
A play within a play also occurs in the musical The King and I, where Princess Tuptim and the royal dancers give a performance of Small House of Uncle Thomas (or Uncle Tom's Cabin) to their English guests. The play mirrors Tuptim's situation, as she wishes to run away from slavery to be with her lover, Lun Tha.
Director Charlie Kaufman uses this concept often in his films. It can be seen most in the 2008 film Synecdoche, New York. The main character Caden Cotard is a skilled director of plays and he receives a grant to make a remarkable theater piece. He ends up creating a carbon copy of the outside world. The 2001 film Moulin Rouge! features a fictitious musical within a film, called "Spectacular Spectacular", which itself may have been based on an ancient Sanskrit play, The Little Clay Cart. The 1942 Ernst Lubitsch comedy To Be or Not to Be confuses the audience in the opening scenes with a play about Adolf Hitler appearing to be taking place within the actual plot of the film. Thereafter, the acting company players serve as the protagonists of the film and frequently use acting/costumes to deceive various characters in the film. Hamlet also serves as an important throughline in the film, as suggested by the title. Laurence Olivier sets the opening scene of his 1944 film of Henry V in the tiring room of the old Globe Theatre as the actors prepare for their roles on stage. The early part of the film follows the actors in these "stage" performances and only later does the action almost imperceptibly expand to the full realism of the Battle of Agincourt. By way of increasingly more artificial sets (based on mediaeval paintings) the film finally returns to The Globe.
The main plot device in Repo! The Genetic Opera is an opera which is going to be held the night of the events of the movie. All of the principal characters of the film play a role in the opera, though the audience watching the opera is unaware that some of the events portrayed are more than drama. At the film To Be or Not to Be, the play "The Naughty Nazis" is forbidden for the Gestapo at the beginning of the film.
In some films, the characters go to a show, and the greater part of the film is the show.
The François Truffaut film Day for Night is about the making of a fictitious movie called Meet Pamela (Je vous présente Pamela) and shows the interactions of the actors as they are making this movie about a woman who falls for her husband's father. The story of Pamela involves lust, betrayal, death, sorrow, and change, events that are mirrored in the experiences of the actors portrayed in Day for Night.
The script to Karel Reisz's movie The French Lieutenant's Woman (1980), written by Harold Pinter, is a film-within-a-film adaptation of John Fowles's book. In addition to the Victorian love story of the book, Pinter creates a present-day background story that shows a love affair between the main actors.
In Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr., Keaton's protagonist actually enters into a film while it is playing in a cinema.
The 2002 Pedro Almodovar film Talk to Her (Hable con Ella) has the chief character Benigno tell a story called The Shrinking Lover to Alicia, a long-term comatose patient whom Benigno, a male nurse, is assigned to care for. The film presents The Shrinking Lover in the form of a black-and-white silent melodrama. To prove his love to a scientist girlfriend, the The Shrinking Lover protagonist drinks a potion that makes him progressively smaller. The resulting seven-minute scene, which is readily intelligible and enjoyable as a stand-alone short subject, is considerably more overtly comic than the rest of Talk to Her -- the protagonist climbs giant breasts as if they were rock formations and even ventures his way inside a (compared to him) gigantic vagina. Critics have noted that The Shrinking Lover essentially is a sex metaphor. Later in Talk to Her, the comatose Alicia is discovered to be pregnant and Benigno is sentenced to jail for rape. The Shrinking Lover was named Best Scene of 2002 in the Skandies, an annual survey of online cinephiles and critics invited each year by critic Mike D'Angelo.
In the 2006 Tarsem film The Fall, an injured silent-movie stuntman tells heroic fantasy stories to a little girl with a broken arm to pass time in the hospital, which the film visualizes and presents with the stuntman's voice becoming voiceover narration. The fantasy tale bleeds back into and comments on the film's "present-tense" story. There are often incongruities based on the fact that the stuntman is an American and the girl Persian -- the stuntman's voiceover refers to "Indians," “a squaw” and “a teepee,” but the visuals show a Bollywood-style devi and a Taj Mahal-like castle.
Mel Brooks's 1974 comedy Blazing Saddles leaves its Western setting when the climactic fight scene breaks out, revealling 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 Theater, which is showing the "premiere" of Blazing Saddles; they enter the cinema to watch the conclusion of their own film.
The concept of a film within a television series is employed in the Macross universe. The Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love? (1984) was originally intended as an alternative theatrical re-telling of the television series The Super Dimension Fortress Macross (1982), but was later "retconned" into the Macross canon as a popular movie within the television series Macross 7 (1994).
In the latter two films of the Scream horror trilogy, a film-within-a-film format is used when the events of the first film spawn their own horror trilogy within the films themselves. In Scream 2, characters get killed while watching a film version of the events in the first Scream film, while in Scream 3 the actors playing the trilogy's characters end up getting killed, much in the same way as the characters they are playing on screen. In the latest Scream movie, Scream 4, in the opening sequence, two characters are watching Stab 7 before they get killed. Also, the characters of Stab 7 are watching Stab 6. 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.
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. Parts of director Spike Jonze's Adaptation. follows a fictionalized version of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman as he struggles to adapt a book into a script, while the movie features scenes about the making of Being John Malkovich, previously written by Kaufman and directed by Jonze.
Tropic Thunder (2008) is a comedy film revolving around a group of prima donna actors making a Vietnam War film (itself also named "Tropic Thunder") when their fed-up writer and director decide to abandon them in the middle of the jungle, forcing them to fight their way out.
The first episode of the anime series The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya consists almost entirely of a poorly made film that the protagonists created, complete with Kyon's typical, sarcastic commentary.
The television shows 30 Rock, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Sonny with a Chance & Kappa Mikey feature a sketch show within the TV show.
Chuck Jones's 1953 cartoon Duck Amuck shows Daffy Duck trapped in a cartoon that an unseen animator repeatedly manipulates. At the end, it is revealed that the whole cartoon was being controlled by Bugs Bunny.
All feature-length films by Jörg Buttgereit except Schramm feature a film within the film. In Nekromantik, the protagonist goes to the cinema to see the fictional slasher film Vera. In Der Todesking one of the character watches a video of the fictional nazi exploitation film Vera - Todesengel der Gestapo and in Nekromantik 2, the characters go to see a movie called Mon dejeuner avec Vera which is a parody of Lois Malle's My Dinner with André.
The Irish television series Father Ted features a television show, Father Ben, which has characters and storylines almost identical to that of Father Ted.
In the Quentin Tarantino film Inglourious Basterds, the Nazi-Propaganda film Nation's Pride is directed by Eli Roth.
In many video games, including the GTA series, mini-games exist that are non-plot oriented, and optional to the completion of the game. GTA: San Andreas features several arcade-like games, including 'Invaders from Uranus' (A Space Invaders parody). GTA 4 has another arcade game called 'Duality'. Also, while not playable video games within video games, the main games in the Pokémon series generally include a television and game console in the player character's room. The specific type of console portrayed depends on which one was most recently released by Nintendo when the specific game was released, e.g. a Wii in Pokémon Black and White versions. The Nintendo 64 video game Donkey Kong 64 also had this system, at one part of the game when playing as Donkey Kong, the player can play the original Donkey Kong game.
In the Shenmue series of games there are several instances of games within the main game. In the first installment, the player is able to play a Sega Saturn inside the Hazuki Residence and there are several Sega arcade games playable in different locations. In Shenmue 2, playable arcade machines featuring other Sega titles are scattered throughout the game world. In Final Fantasy VII there are several video-games that can be played in an arcade in the Gold Saucer theme park, consisting of a beat-em-up, a snowboarding game, an RPG and a submarine game.
There are several cases where an author has nested his fiction more deeply than just two layers.
The earliest examples are in Ugrasrava's epic Mahabharata and Vishnu Sarma's Panchatantra. Some of the stories narrated in the Panchatantra often had stories within them. In the epic Mahabharata, the Kurukshetra War is narrated by a character in Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa's Jaya, which itself is narrated by a character in Vaisampayana's Bharata, which itself is narrated by a character in Ugrasrava's Mahabharata.
Another early example is The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, where the general story is narrated by an unknown narrator, and in this narration the stories are told by Scheherazade. In most of Scheherazade's narrations there are also stories narrated, and even in some of these, there are some other stories.
In Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, there is 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 a book entitled "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 narrative, which itself is somewhat self-referential, the two characters find a book entitled "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 Achilles, and Achilles taking the part of the Tortoise.
In The Sandman by Neil Gaiman, the necropolis apprentice Petrefax tells a story that includes a storytelling session about Destruction telling a story. It is later shown that this - along with all the other stories in World's End - are being related to a bar girl by one of the characters present at Petrefax's original storytelling session.
In Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years, Adrian writes a book entitled Lo! The Flat Hills Of My Homeland, in which the main character, Jake Westmorland, writes a book called Sparg of Kronk, whose eponymous character, Sparg, writes a book with no language.
In Philip K. Dick's novel The Man in the High Castle, each character comes into interaction with a book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which was written by the Man in the High Castle. Dick's novel details a world in which the Axis Powers of World War II had succeeded in dominating the known world. The novel within the novel details an alternative to this history in which the Allies overcome the Axis and bring stability to the world.
In Red Orc's Rage by Philip J. Farmer a doubly recursive method is used to interwine its fictional layers. This novel is part of a science-fiction series, the World of Tiers. Farmer collaborated in the writing of this novel with an American psychiatrist,Dr. A. James Giannini. Dr. Giannini had previously used the World of Tiers series in treating patients in group therapy. During these therapeutic sessions, the content and process of the text and novelist was discussed rather than the lives of the patients. In this way subconscious defenses could be circumvented. Farmer took the real life case-studies and melded these with adventures of his characters in the series.[10]
In an old Chinese tale, a monk is telling a story to a young monk, in which the story is about a monk telling a story to a young monk, and nest the story infinitely deep.
Occasionally a story within a story becomes such a popular element that the producer(s) decide to develop it autonomonously (completing it if it is incomplete) as a separate and distinct work. This is sometimes called a "spin-off".
In the fictional world of the Toy Story movies, Buzz Lightyear is an animated toy action figure, which was based on a fictitious cartoon series, Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, which did not exist in the real world except for snippets seen within Toy Story. Later, Buzz Lightyear of Star Command was produced in full in the real world, perhaps prompted by people who thought that the brief showing of Buzz Lightyear of Star Command in Toy Story was an embedded real-world advertisement.
Another notable example is the relationship between Genshiken, a manga series about popular culture, and Kujibiki Unbalance, a series in the Genshiken universe, which has spawned merchandise of its own, and is being remade into a series on its own.
On other occasions such spin-offs may be produced as a way of providing additional information on the fictional world for fans. A well-known example of this comes in the Harry Potter series of J. K. Rowling, where three such supplemental books have been produced, with the profits going to charity. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is a textbook used by the main character, and Quidditch Through the Ages is a book from the library at his school. The Tales of Beedle the Bard provides an additional layer of fiction, the 'tales' being instructional stories told to children in the characters' world.
Perhaps the most unusual example of this was the fictitious author Kilgore Trout, who appears in the works of Kurt Vonnegut. In the world of those stories, Kilgore Trout has written a novel called Venus on the Half-Shell. In 1975 real-world author Philip José Farmer wrote a science-fiction novel called Venus on the Half-Shell, which he published under the name Kilgore Trout.
The movie Adaptation was presented as if it had been written by Charlie Kaufman and his fictitious brother Donald Kaufman. Both 'brothers' were nominated for an Oscar that year.
Sometimes such spin-offs are produced against the original creator's wishes. One example is that the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip (written by Bill Waterson) includes in its scenario a children's book Hamster Huey & The Gooey Kablooie, and Bill Waterson stated in The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book that he believed that Hamster Huey & The Gooey Kablooie should remain an undefined story, left to the reader's imagination; but someone not associated with the strip published Hamster Huey & The Gooey Kablooie in the real world.
At least one complete Captain Proton story has been written in the real world: [1] Captain Proton: Defender of the Earth, a comic, by Dean Wesley Smith, who presumed that in the Star Trek universe, the holonovel Captain Proton was adapted from a supposed 1930's comic; and he set out to write and publish that comic in the real world. (Other fan fiction described as Captain Proton stories are Star Trek: Voyager stories whose action happens partly in Voyager's holodeck where the Captain Proton program is running.)
In the television series Bones, forensic anthropologist Dr. Temperance Brennan spends much of her free time writing novels about a forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs. This mimics Reichs' own real-life second career of writing the Temperance Brennan series of novels and working as executive producer of the TV show, all while working as a forensic anthropologist at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for the State of North Carolina and the Laboratoire des Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale for the province of Québec. Brennan has made at least one other reference to the real-life Kathy Reichs most notably by stating in the series pilot that the closest other forensic anthropologist is in Montreal.
Like S. Morgenstern, Peter Schikele's P.D.Q. Bach can be considered a "fictional artist", who supposedly created the works actually created by the artist's own creator. P.D.Q.'s life thus becomes something of a "frame story" (albeit indirectly) for such works as his opera The Abduction of Figaro.
Mystery author Ellery Queen can also be considered a "fictional artist" of sorts, though the proverbial line between his "true-life" and "fictional" exploits are generally very blurred.
In this case the "frame story"—that is, the fictional creator's life—can be considered metafictional, since each story (or other work) supposedly created by that character adds a little to his or her own (fictional) story.
Sometimes a song or a poem or an image in a fiction work, which was actually composed by the author, is attributed by the author to one of his characters, for example the song "Namarie" in The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, which Tolkien attributes to the character Galadriel.
Occasionally, though primarily on television, the characters in a story become the subjects of dramatizations based on their own lives or events that they have experienced. The most notorious case of this took place on the Seinfeld television series; it has also happened on other shows including The X-Files, Stargate SG1 and the short-lived Ellery Queen series.
An early phenomenon related to the "story within a story" is the "framing device" or "frame story", where a supplemental story is used to help tell the main story. In the supplemental story, or "frame", one or more characters tell the main story to one or more other characters.
The earliest examples of "frame stories" and "stories within stories" were in ancient Indian literature, such as the Mahabharata, Ramayana, Fables of Bidpai, Hitopadesha and Vikram and the Vampire. Both The Golden Ass by Apuleius and Metamorphoses by Ovid extend the depths of framing to several degrees. Another early example is the famous Arabian Nights, in which Sheherazade narrates stories within stories, and even within some of these, more stories are narrated. Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales is also a frame story.
A well-known modern example of this is The Princess Bride, both the book and the movie. In the movie, a grandfather is reading the story of "The Princess Bride" to his grandson. In the book, a more detailed frame story has a father editing a (nonexistent) much longer work for his son, creating his own "Good Parts Version" (as the book called it) by leaving out all the parts that would bore a young boy. Both the book and the movie assert that the central story is from a book called "The Princess Bride" by a nonexistent author named S. Morgenstern.
Sometimes a frame story exists in the same setting as the main story. On the television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, each episode was framed as though it were being told by an older Indy (usually a very elderly George Hall, though one featured Harrison Ford).