Box story

A story in a box (also a story in a box , a story in a box ) is a story that itself contains a story. The latter can also contain a narrative. Theoretically, this could be continued as often as desired on other levels. Texts with more than two narrative levels are referred to as box stories in the narrower sense . In contrast, forms with a simple structure consisting of two narrative levels, consisting of a frame narrative with mostly several internal narratives embedded in it , are comparatively common . A famous example of this is Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron . Other classic examples with narration embedded are

• Apuleius : the golden donkey
• Geoffrey Chaucer : Canterbury Tales
• Margaret of Navarre : Heptaméron

An early example of more complex structures with more than two narrative levels is a thousand and one nights , where there are repeated narrations within other narrations. The frame narration (E1) here forms the story of Scheherazade , which tells for its life, whereby the course of the embedded narrative is interrupted again and again when the morning comes. For example, she tells the well-known story of the fisherman who found a bottle (E2) and in this the fisherman tells Ifrit the story of the Greek king and the doctor Duban (E3).

Another example that takes this principle very far with a box depth of up to six narrative levels is the novel Die Handschrift von Saragossa by Jan Graf Potocki . An example from contemporary German literature is Herbert Rosendorf’s novel The Ruin Builder .

literature

• Karin Kukkonen: Action / Plot: Multiple Plots. In: Martin Huber , Wolf Schmid (Hrsg.): Basic themes of literary studies: storytelling. Walter de Gruyter, 2017, ISBN 978-3-11-041074-7 , chap. III.2.2.3, p. 286 ff ..
• William Nelles: Frameworks: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narrative. Lang, New York et al. a. 1997, ISBN 0-8204-3039-0 .
• Reingard M. Nischik : One-strand and multiple-strand action management in literary texts: Depicted in particular in English, American and Canadian novels of the 20th century. Dissertation Cologne 1980. Narr, Tübingen 1981, ISBN 3-87808-545-1 .