When there is a single story, the frame story is used for other purposes – chiefly to position the reader's attitude toward the tale. This can be done in a variety of ways.
Casting doubt on the narrator A common reason to frame one story is to draw attention to the
narrator's unreliability. By explicitly making the narrator a character within the frame story, the writer distances him or herself from the narrator. The writer may characterize the narrator to cast doubt on the narrator's truthfulness, as when in
P. G. Wodehouse's stories of
Mr. Mulliner, Mulliner is made a
fly fisherman, a person who is expected to tell tales of unbelievably large fish. The movie
Amadeus is framed as a story that an old
Antonio Salieri tells to a young priest, because the movie is based more on stories Salieri told about
Mozart than on historical fact.
Procatalepsis Another use is a form of
procatalepsis, where the writer puts the readers' possible reactions to the story in the characters listening to it. In
The Princess Bride, the frame of a grandfather reading the story to his reluctant grandson puts the cynical reaction a viewer might have to the romantic fairytale into the story, through the grandson's persona, and helps defuse it. This is the use when the frame tells a story that lacks a strong
narrative hook in its opening; the narrator can engage the reader's interest by telling the story to answer the curiosity of his listeners, or by warning them that the story began in an ordinary seeming way, but they must follow it to understand later actions, thereby identifying the reader's wondering whether the story is worth reading to the listeners'. Such an approach was used, too, by Edith Wharton in her novella
Ethan Frome, in which a nameless narrator hears from many characters in the town of Starkfield about the main character Ethan's story.
False documents A frame story may use "false documents" to explain how the story-within-a story has been uncovered. Examples include letters provided to Mr Utterson in the
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the 'Historical Notes' epilogue of ''
The Handmaid's Tale'' (which explains that the preceding narrative was originally recorded on a set of audio cassettes), and
epistolary novels in general.
Dream vision A specialized form of the frame is a
dream vision, where the narrator claims to have gone to sleep, dreamed the events of the story, and then awoken to tell the tale. In medieval Europe, this was a common device, used to indicate that the events included are fictional;
Geoffrey Chaucer used it in
The Book of the Duchess,
The House of Fame,
Parlement of Foules, and
The Legend of Good Women (the last also containing a multi-story frame story within the dream). Later,
John Bunyan used a dream device in the Christian allegory ''
Pilgrim's Progress'' and its sequel, explaining that they were dreams he had while he was in prison and felt God wanted him to write down. This worked because it made what might have been seen as a fantasy more like a divine revelation to others who believed as he did. In modern usage, it is sometimes used in works of
fantasy as a means toward
suspension of disbelief about the marvels depicted in the story.
J.R.R. Tolkien, in his essay "
On Fairy-Stories" complained of such devices as unwillingness to treat the genre seriously;
he used frame stories of different kinds in his
Middle-earth writings.
Lewis Carroll's
Alice stories (''
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass'') includes such a frame, the stories themselves using dream-like logic and sequences. Still, even as the story proceeds realistically, the dream frame casts doubt on the events. In the book
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the events really occur; the dream frame added for
the movie detracts from the validity of the fantasy. == Use ==