Frame Story Examples in Short Stories: 6 Tales Told Inside Another
Quick answer: Frame story examples from Twain, Chekhov, Kipling, Irving, Tagore and Saki: how the outer tale shapes the inner one, and what happens when the frame closes.
A frame story is a narrative that contains another narrative: a listener meets a teller, the teller tells, and the story we came for sits inside the story of its telling. The frame is never neutral. It tells us who is speaking, why, to whom, and how far to believe them, and when it closes at the end it can change everything the inner tale seemed to mean.
Six tales told inside another
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain has a narrator call on garrulous Simon Wheeler to ask after a man named Leonidas Smiley, and get instead the endless tale of Jim Smiley and his frog. The frame narrator's exasperation is the comedy; the inner tale is only funny because someone is trapped listening to it.
Gooseberries by Anton Chekhov puts Ivan Ivanovich and Burkin in Alekhin's house after a swim in the rain, where Ivan tells the story of his brother's gooseberries and then his own rage at contentment. The frame closes with the listeners unmoved, the smell of Ivan's pipe in the room, and rain on the windows. The inner story's argument is quietly not accepted.
The Man Who Would Be King by Rudyard Kipling has a journalist narrator meet Peachey Carnehan and Daniel Dravot, lose them, and then receive Peachey, broken, who tells how the two men made themselves kings in Kafiristan and how Dravot died. The frame narrator's office, the heat, the printing press, make the inner story's madness measurable.
Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving presents the tale as found among the papers of Diedrich Knickerbocker, with a postscript defending its truth. The frame is a joke about credibility that lets Irving tell a legend straight while keeping his own face grave.
The Hungry Stones by Rabindranath Tagore begins on a railway platform where the narrator and a relative meet a stranger who tells of his months in a haunted marble palace at Barich. The train arrives before the stranger can finish. The frame's interruption is the ending, and the story's meaning includes the fact that we will never hear the rest.
The Storyteller by Saki puts a bachelor in a railway carriage with an aunt and three restless children. The aunt's improving story fails; the bachelor's story of a horribly good girl eaten by a wolf succeeds completely. The frame is a comedy about what stories are for, and the inner tale is the evidence.
How to use it in your own story
The frame must do work the inner story cannot. If removing the frame loses nothing, remove it.
Common mistakes
The commonest is the decorative frame, a few lines of a narrator sitting down and standing up that add nothing. A second is the forgotten frame, where the story opens with a teller and never returns to them. A third is the frame that over-explains, a listener at the end telling us the moral.
Where readers meet it today
Readers meet the device today in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, Jorge Luis Borges's The Garden of Forking Paths, Ryunosuke Akutagawa's In a Grove and, at feature length, in countless films that open with a storyteller.
What writers can take from this
- Cut the frame if the inner story loses nothing without it.
- Give the listener a reason to be there and a reaction at the end.
- Use the frame to set the level of belief.
- Return to it. A frame that never closes is a broken window.
- Let the frame interrupt, judge or contradict the inner tale.
Try it yourself
Write a 700-word story in which a taxi driver tells a passenger a story during a twenty-minute ride. The frame must return at least twice during the telling, and the passenger's final reaction must change how the reader understands the driver's tale.
Questions
What is an example of a frame story in a short story?
Chekhov's Gooseberries, where Ivan Ivanovich tells two friends the story of his brother's estate and his own disgust with contentment. The frame closes with the listeners unmoved and rain on the windows, which qualifies everything Ivan said.
How do you identify a frame story?
Look for a story that begins with someone about to tell a story, and check whether the narration returns to that outer situation at the end. The frame is the outer situation; the inner tale is what the teller says.
Is a frame story the same as a story within a story?
A frame story is one kind of story within a story, where the outer narrative exists mainly to hold the inner one. In other cases the embedded tale is a small part of a larger plot rather than its container.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
Enter a Writory story contest
Enter the Writory Short Story Contest and have your own story read and scored out of 100. Entries close 25 November. That first entry makes you a Writorian.