Story within a story
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.
Many modern children's story collections are essentially anthology works connected by this device, such as Arnold Lobel's Mouse Tales, Paula Fox's The Little Swineherd, and Phillip and Hillary Sherlock's Ears and Tails and Common Sense.
In the Welsh novel Aelwyd F'Ewythr Robert (1852) see by Gwilym Hiraethog, a visitor to a farm in north Wales tells the story of Uncle Tom's Cabin to those gathered around the hearth.
On the television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, each episode was framed as though it were being told by Indy when he was older (usually acted by George Hall, but once by Harrison Ford).
The same device of an adult narrator representing the older version of a young protagonist is used in the films Stand by Me and A Christmas Story, and the television show The Wonder Years and How I Met Your Mother.
The secondary novel ends before its conclusion returning the narrative to the original, and primary, story where the protagonist and reviewer of the book attempts to find the final chapter.
As this progresses characters and messages within the fictional Magpie Murders manifest themselves within the primary narrative and the final chapter's content reveals the reason for its original absence.
The 2023 Christian fictional novel Just Once by Karen Kingsbury features a series of three nested stories, all centering around the main characters of Hank and Irvel Myers:[citation needed] This structure is also found in classic religious and philosophical texts.
Farmer collaborated in the writing of this novel with an American psychiatrist, A. James Giannini, who had previously used the World of Tiers series in treating patients in group therapy.
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 a 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.
The book Cloud Atlas (later adapted into a film by The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer) consisted of six interlinked stories nested inside each other in a Russian doll fashion.
The first story (that of Adam Ewing in the 1850s befriending an escaped slave) is interrupted halfway through and revealed to be part of a journal being read by composer Robert Frobisher in 1930s Belgium.
His own story of working for a more famous composer is told in a series of letters to his lover Rufus Sixsmith, which are interrupted halfway through and revealed to be in the possession of an investigative journalist named Luisa Rey and so on.
Presuming each layer to be a true telling within the overall story, a chain of events is created linking Adam Ewing's embrace of the abolitionist movement in the 1850s to the religious redemption of a post-apocalyptic tribal man over a century after the fall of modern civilization.
The characters in each nested layer take inspiration or lessons from the stories of their predecessors in a manner that validates a belief stated in the sixth tale that "Our lives are not our own.
Another example is found in Samuel Delany's Trouble on Triton, which features a theater company that produces elaborate staged spectacles for randomly selected single-person audiences.
[15] In Francis Beaumont's Knight of the Burning Pestle (c. 1608) a supposed common citizen from the audience, actually a "planted" actor, condemns the play that has just started and "persuades" the players to present something about a shopkeeper.
[18] John Adams' Nixon in China (1985–1987) features a surreal version of Madam Mao's Red Detachment of Women, illuminating the ascendance of human values over the disillusionment of high politics in the meeting.
[19] 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.
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 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.
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 Duck Amuck plot was essentially replicated in one of Jones' later cartoons, Rabbit Rampage (1955), in which Bugs Bunny turns out to be the victim of the sadistic animator (Elmer Fudd).
Walt Disney's 1946 live-action drama film Song of the South has three animated sequences, all based on the Br'er Rabbit stories, told as moral fables by Uncle Remus (James Baskett) to seven-year-old Johnny (Bobby Driscoll) and his friends Ginny (Luana Patten) and Toby (Glenn Leedy).
The 1942 Ernst Lubitsch comedy To Be or Not to Be confuses the audience in the opening scenes with a play, "The Naughty Nazis", about Adolf Hitler which appears to be taking place within the actual plot of the film.
Similarly, on the long running animated sitcom The Simpsons, Bart's favorite cartoon, Itchy and Scratchy (a parody of Tom & Jerry), often echoes the plotlines of the main show.
The "USS Callister" episode of the Black Mirror anthology television series is about a man who is obsessed with a Star Trek-like show and recreates it as part of a virtual reality game.
The 1979 experimental novel If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino follows a reader, addressed in the second person, trying to read the very same book, but being interrupted by ten other recursively nested incomplete stories.
As his onscreen self succumbs to the temptation to commercialize the narrative, Kaufman incorporates those techniques into the script, including tropes such as an invented romance, a car chase, a drug-running sequence, and an imaginary identical twin for the protagonist.
Similarly, in Kaufman's self-directed 2008 film Synecdoche, New York, the main character Caden Cotard is a skilled director of plays who receives a grant, and ends up creating a remarkable theater piece intended as a carbon copy of the outside world.
