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92-544: Although it is labeled "Unauthorized" for humor, the book is in fact official. Beginning with a multi-layered introduction by Daniel Handler that encompasses twelve of the book's thirteen chapters, the book is largely made up of facsimile documents, such as old newspaper excerpts and letters, as well as excerpts from other books. The book also uses a mixture of black-and-white photography by Meredith Heuer and Julie Blattberg and 1930s photography gathered from an archive of photographs originally used for other purposes. It has

184-475: 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. As the story concludes, the " Tale of Núr al-Dín Alí and his Son " is narrated within it. This perennially popular work can be traced back to Arabic , Persian , and Indian storytelling traditions. Mary Shelley 's Frankenstein has

276-496: A "bonus material" style inner story is the chapter "The Town Ho's Story" in Herman Melville 's novel Moby-Dick ; that chapter tells a fully formed story of an exciting mutiny and contains many plot ideas that Melville had conceived during the early stages of writing Moby-Dick —ideas originally intended to be used later in the novel—but as the writing progressed, these plot ideas eventually proved impossible to fit around

368-408: 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 relates, 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 significant portion of Walter Moers ' Labyrinth of Dreaming Books is an ekphrasis on

460-464: A deeply nested frame story structure, that features the narration of Walton, 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. Another classic novel with a frame story is Wuthering Heights , the majority of which is recounted by the central family's housekeeper to a boarder. Similarly, Roald Dahl 's story The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

552-585: A history compiled by several of the characters. The subtitle 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. An example of an interconnected inner story is "The Mad Trist" in Edgar Allan Poe 's Fall of the House of Usher , where through somewhat mystical means the narrator's reading of

644-480: 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 includes footnotes and letters that tell their own stories only vaguely related to the events in the main narrative of the book, and footnotes for fake books. Robert A. Heinlein 's later books ( The Number of the Beast , The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and To Sail Beyond

736-420: 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. Each of the first five tales are interrupted in the middle, with the sixth tale being told in full, before the preceding five tales are finished in reverse order. Each layer of the story either challenges

828-542: A narrative counterpoint and add a touch of surrealism to the main narrative. They additionally raise the question of whether works of artistic genius justify or atone for the sins and crimes of their creators. Auster's The Book of Illusions (2002) and Flicker by Theodore Roszak (1991) also rely heavily on fictional films within their respective narratives. This dramatic device was probably first used by Thomas Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy around 1587, where

920-731: A noble story, the boring character tells a very dull tale, and the rude miller tells a smutty tale. Homer 's Odyssey too makes use of this device; Odysseus ' adventures at sea are all narrated by Odysseus to the court of king Alcinous in Scheria . Other shorter tales, many of them false, account for much of the Odyssey . 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 . A well-known modern example of framing

1012-591: A reversible cover, making it possible to disguise the autobiography as The Luckiest Kids in the World: The Pony Party by Loney M. Setnick (an anagram for Lemony Snicket). The reversible cover also includes a back cover summary which describes the book as "delightfully appropriate". The book helps clear up some loose ends from the series, but it also introduces many more mysteries, as well as elucidates details which readers might have missed in previous books. It also answers and raises many questions about

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1104-409: A short film; or a novel may contain a short story within the novel. A story within a story can be used in all types of narration including poems , and songs . Stories within stories can be used simply to enhance entertainment for the reader or viewer, or can act as examples to teach lessons to other characters. The inner story often has a symbolic and psychological significance for the characters in

1196-461: A sprawling, loosely interconnected science fiction narrative, as do the albums of Janelle Monae . On Tom Waits 's concept album Alice (consisting of music he wrote for the musical of the same name), most of the songs are (very) loosely inspired by both Alice in Wonderland , and the book's real-life author, Lewis Carroll , and inspiration Alice Liddell . The song "Poor Edward", however,

1288-468: A story A story within a story , also referred to as an embedded narrative , is a literary device in which a character within a story becomes the narrator of a second story (within the first one). Multiple layers of stories within stories are sometimes called nested stories . A play may have a brief play within it, such as in Shakespeare's play Hamlet ; a film may show the characters watching

1380-413: A story dates back to a device known as a " frame story ", where a supplemental story is used to help tell the main story. Typically, the outer story or "frame" does not have much matter, and most of the work consists of one or more complete stories told by one or more storytellers. The earliest examples of "frame stories" and "stories within stories" were in ancient Egyptian and Indian literature , such as

1472-674: A style adopted from Sangam literature. Later, during the Chola period, Kamban (12th century) wrote what is considered one of the greatest Tamil epics — the Kamba Ramayanam of Kamban , based on the Valmiki Ramayana. The Thiruthondat Puranam (or Periya Puranam ) of Chekkizhar is the great Tamil epic of the Shaiva Bhakti saints and is part of the religious scripture of Tamil Nadu's majority Shaivites. Most of

1564-508: 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. 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

1656-459: A tale 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. The critically acclaimed Beatles album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

1748-459: 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 . In the Welsh novel Aelwyd F'Ewythr Robert (1852), 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. Sometimes a frame story exists in the same setting as

1840-549: Is James Merrill 's 1974 modernist poem " Lost in Translation ". In Rabih Alameddine 's novel The Hakawati , or The Storyteller , the protagonist describes coming home to the funeral of his father, one of a long line of traditional Arabic storytellers. Throughout the narrative, the author becomes hakawati (an Arabic word for a teller of traditional tales) himself, weaving the tale of the story of his own life and that of his family with folkloric versions of tales from Qur'an,

1932-504: Is a graphic novel about a middle-school musical production, and the tentative romantic fumblings of its cast members. In Manuel Puig 's Kiss of the Spider Woman , ekphrases on various old movies, some real, and some fictional, make up a substantial portion of the narrative. In Paul Russell 's Boys of Life , descriptions of movies by director/antihero Carlos (loosely inspired by controversial director Pier Paolo Pasolini ) provide

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2024-672: Is a language with a rich granary of epic poetries, mostly written in archaic version of the Meitei script in Puyas , the Meitei texts. The sagas of the seven epic cycles of incarnations of the two divine lovers were originated from the shoreline Moirang around the Loktak lake in Manipur . Their stories were composed in both prose and poetry, among which the ballad versions were usually sung by

2116-552: Is about a rich bachelor who finds an essay written by someone who learned 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. Lewis Carroll 's Alice books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), have several multiple poems that are mostly recited by several characters to

2208-499: Is about a troupe of actors who perform a play about marital infidelity that mirrors their own lives, and composer Richard Rodney Bennett and playwright - librettist Beverley Cross 's The Mines of Sulphur features a ghostly troupe of actors who perform a play about murder that similarly mirrors the lives of their hosts, from whom they depart, leaving them with the plague as nemesis. John Adams ' Nixon in China (1985-7) features

2300-515: 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. 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

2392-592: Is also found in classic religious and philosophical texts. The structure of The Symposium and Phaedo , attributed to Plato , is of a story within a story within a story. In the Christian Bible , the gospels are accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus . However, they also include within them the parables that Jesus told. In more modern philosophical works, Jostein Gaarder 's books often feature this device. Examples are The Solitaire Mystery , where

2484-501: Is also the world's longest epic, has a nested structure. The experimental modernist works that incorporate multiple narratives into one story are quite often science-fiction or science fiction influenced. These include most of the various novels written by the 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

2576-497: Is based on the legendary love story of Khuman Khamba , an orphan man, and Thoibi , the then princess of Moirang . Though the legend existed in the immortal songs of the Meitei balladeers, it was composed in a proper poetic version by Hijam Anganghal in 1940. The Numit Kappa , literally meaning "Shooting at the Sun" in Meitei , is a 1st-century BC Meitei epic, based on the story of a hero named Khwai Nungjeng Piba , who shoots one of

2668-646: Is composed entirely in Kannada numerals . The Saangathya metre of Kannada poetry is employed in the work. It uses numerals 1 through 64 and employs various patterns or bandhas in a frame of 729 (27×27) squares to represent letters in nearly 18 scripts and over 700 languages. Some of the patterns used include the Chakrabandha , Hamsabandha , Varapadmabandha , Sagarabandha , Sarasabandha , Kruanchabandha , Mayurabandha , Ramapadabandha , and Nakhabandha . As each of these patterns are identified and decoded,

2760-467: Is independent, and could either be skipped or stand separately, although many subtle connections may be lost. Often there is more than one level of internal stories, leading to deeply-nested fiction. 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). The literary device of stories within

2852-516: Is lost. The most famous poet from this period is Pampa (902-975 CE), one of the most famous writers in the Kannada language . His Vikramarjuna Vijaya (also called the Pampabharatha ) is hailed as a classic even to this day. With this and his other important work Ādi purāṇa he set a trend of poetic excellence for the Kannada poets of the future. The former work is an adaptation of

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2944-511: Is presented as a stage show by the fictional eponymous band, and one of its songs, "A Day in the Life" is in the form of a story within a dream. Similarly, the Fugees album The Score is presented as the soundtrack to a fictional movie, as are several other notable concept albums , while Wyclef Jean 's The Carnival is presented as testimony at a trial. The majority of Ayreon 's albums outline

3036-450: Is presented as a story told by a narrator about Edward Mordrake , and the song "Fish and Bird" is presented as a retold story that the narrator heard from a sailor. In his 1895 historical novel Pharaoh , Bolesław Prus introduces a number of stories within the story, ranging in length from vignettes to full-blown stories, many of them drawn from ancient Egyptian texts, that further the plot, illuminate characters , and even inspire

3128-441: Is presented as a translation of a found manuscript by (fictional) Cide Hamete Benengeli . A commonly independently anthologised story is " The Grand Inquisitor " by Dostoevsky from his long psychological novel The Brothers Karamazov , which 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. An example of

3220-724: Is the epic poetry written in the Indian subcontinent , traditionally called Kavya (or Kāvya ; Sanskrit : काव्य, IAST: kāvyá ). The Ramayana and the Mahabharata , which were originally composed in Sanskrit and later translated into many other Indian languages, and the Five Great Epics of Tamil literature and Sangam literature are some of the oldest surviving epic poems ever written. In modern Hindi literature, Kamayani by Jaishankar Prasad has attained

3312-399: Is the fantasy genre work 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 much longer (but fictive) work for his son, creating his own "Good Parts Version" (as the book called it) by leaving out all the parts that would bore or displease

3404-568: The Neil Gaiman series The Sandman feature an endless series of waking from one dream into another dream. In Charles Maturin 's novel Melmoth the Wanderer , the use of vast stories-within-stories creates a sense of dream-like quality in the reader. 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: This structure

3496-953: The Sanskrit epics such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana were also translated into Meitei language in the medieval times. Other translated epic works include the Meghnad Badh Kavya , the Bhagavad Gita , and the Ashtakam . In 14th century Madhav Kandali dubbed the epic Ramayana as Saptakanda Ramayana . In chronology, among vernacular translations of the original Sanskrit, Kandali's Ramayana comes after Kamban 's ( Tamil , 12th century)and Gona Budda Reddy's ( Telugu : Ranganath Ramayanamu ) and ahead of Kirttivas ' ( Bengali , 15th century), Tulsidas ' ( Awadhi , 16th century), Balaram Das' (Oriya) etc. Thus it becomes

3588-711: The Slaying of Śiśupāla Śiśupālavadha of Māgha , Arjuna and the Mountain Man Kirātārjunīya of Bhāravi , the Adventures of the Prince of Nishadha Naiṣadhacarita of Śrīharṣa and Bhaṭṭi's Poem Bhaṭṭikāvya of Bhaṭṭi . The post- sangam period (2nd century-6th century) saw many great Tamil epics being written, including Cilappatikaram (or Silappadhikaram ), Manimegalai , Civaka Cintamani , Valayapathi and Kundalakesi . Out of

3680-446: 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

3772-548: The 1st-2nd century. He wrote a biography of the Buddha, titled Buddhacarita. His second epic is called Saundarananda and tells the story of the conversion of Nanda, the younger brother of the Buddha. The play he wrote is called Śariputraprakaraṇa, but of this play only a few fragments remained. The famous poet and playwright Kālidāsa also wrote two epics: Raghuvamsha ( The Dynasty of Raghu ) and Kumarasambhava ( The Birth of Kumar Kartikeya ). Other classical Sanskrit epics are

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3864-594: The Egyptian " Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor " and Indian epics like the Ramayana , Seven Wise Masters , Hitopadesha and Vikrama and Vethala . 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

3956-675: 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. As 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

4048-486: The Old Testament, Ovid, and One Thousand and One Nights. Both the tales he tells of his family (going back to his grandfather) and the embedded folk tales, themselves embed other tales, often 2 or more layers deep. In Sue Townsend 's Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years , Adrian writes the book Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland , in which the character Jake Westmorland writes a book called Sparg of Kronk , where

4140-558: 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 . 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

4232-537: The Sunset ) propose the idea that every real universe is a fiction in another universe. This hypothesis enables many writers who are characters in the books to interact with their own creations. Margaret Atwood 's novel The Blind Assassin 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. In Philip K. Dick 's novel The Man in

4324-584: The action of the play. In Francis Beaumont 's Knight of the Burning Pestle (ca. 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. The citizen's "apprentice" then acts, pretending to extemporise, in the rest of the play. This is a satirical tilt at Beaumont's playwright contemporaries and their current fashion for offering plays about London life. The opera Pagliacci

4416-471: The celebrated Mahabharata , and is the first such adaptation in Kannada. Noted for the strong human bent and the dignified style in his writing, Pampa has been one of the most influential writers in Kannada. He is identified as Adikavi "first poet". It is only in Kannada that we have a Ramayana and a Mahabharata based on the Jain tradition in addition to those based on Brahmanical tradition. Shivakotiacharya

4508-409: The character Sparg writes a book with no language. In Anthony Horowitz 's Magpie Murders , a significant proportion of the book features a fictional but authentically formatted mystery novel by Alan Conway, titled 'Magpie Murders'. 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

4600-465: The characters that Melville went on to create and develop . Instead of discarding the ideas altogether, Melville wove them into a coherent short story and had the character Ishmael demonstrate his eloquence and intelligence by telling the story to his impressed friends. One of the most complicated structures of a story within a story was used by Vladimir Nabokov in his novel The Gift . There, as inner stories, function both poems and short stories by

4692-409: The characters—the motives and the reliability of the storyteller are automatically in question. 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 some cases, the story within a story is involved in the action of the plot of the outer story. In others, the inner story

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4784-486: 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. The Quantum Leap novel Knights of the Morningstar also features a character who writes a book by that name. In Matthew Stover 's novel Shatterpoint ,

4876-562: The contents can be read. The work is said to have around 600,000 verses, nearly six times as big as the ancient Indian epic Mahabharata . The Prabhulingaleele , Basava purana , Channabasavapurana and Basavarajavijaya are a few of the Lingayat epics. Meitei language (officially known as Manipuri language ), an old Sino-Tibetan language, originated from Ancient Kangleipak (early Manipur ) in North East India ,

4968-458: The creation of 1950s writer Benny Russell. 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

5060-586: The earliest phase of Classical Sanskrit , following the latest stage of Vedic Sanskrit found in the Shrauta Sutras . The Suparṇākhyāna , a late Vedic poem considered to be among the "earliest traces of epic poetry in India," is an older, shorter precursor to the expanded legend of Garuda that is included within the Mahābhārata . The Buddhist kavi Aśvaghoṣa wrote two epics and one drama. He lived in

5152-735: The 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 . Both The Golden Ass by Apuleius and Metamorphoses by Ovid extend the depths of framing to several degrees. Another early example is the One Thousand and One Nights ( Arabian Nights ), where

5244-573: The exposure of a murderer (although not a king). The play I Hate Hamlet and the movie A Midwinter's Tale are about a production of Hamlet , which in turn includes a production of The Murder of Gonzago , as does the Hamlet -based film Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead , which even features a third-level puppet theatre version within their play. Similarly, in Anton Chekhov 's The Seagull there are specific allusions to Hamlet : in

5336-577: The fashioning of individual characters. Jan Potocki 's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1797–1805) has an interlocking structure with stories-within-stories reaching several levels of depth. 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

5428-409: 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. Dreams are a common way of including stories inside stories, and can sometimes go several levels deep. Both the book The Arabian Nightmare and the curse of "eternal waking" from

5520-513: 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. Shakespeare adopted the play-within-a-play device for many of his other plays as well, including A Midsummer Night's Dream and Love's Labours Lost . Almost

5612-511: The first rendition of the Ramayana into an Indo-Aryan language in the Indian subcontinent. The ancient Sanskrit epics the Ramayana and Mahabharata comprise together the Itihāsa ( lit.   ' writer has himself witnessed the story ' ) or Mahākāvya ("Great Compositions"), a canon of Hindu scripture . Inde bbu nued, the epic form prevailed and verse remained until very recently

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5704-573: The five, Manimegalai and Kundalakesi are Buddhist religious works, Civaka Cintamani and Valayapathi are Tamil Jain works and Silappatikaram has a neutral religious view. They were written over a period of 1st century CE to 10th century CE and act as the historical evidence of social, religious, cultural and academic life of people during the era they were created. Civaka Cintamani introduced long verses called virutha pa in Tamil literature, while Silappatikaram used akaval meter (monologue),

5796-401: 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. An example of this is " The Three Apples ", a murder mystery narrated by Scheherazade. Within the story, after the murderer reveals himself, he narrates

5888-529: The last day of the battle of Kurukshetra and relating the story of the Mahabharata through a series of flashbacks. Structurally, the poetry in this period is in the Champu style, essentially poetry interspersed with lyrical prose. The Siribhoovalaya is a unique work of multilingual Kannada literature written by Kumudendu Muni , a Jain monk . The work is unique in that it does not employ letters, but

5980-409: The main character Fyodor Cherdyntsev as well as the whole Chapter IV, a critical biography of Nikolay Chernyshevsky (also written by Fyodor). This novel is considered one of the first metanovels in literature. 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

6072-480: The main story. 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 . In The Amory Wars ,

6164-481: The minstrels, playing Pena (musical instrument) since ancient times. The Khamba Thoibi Sheireng (based on the story of Khamba and Thoibi ) is regarded as the greatest of all the Meitei epics. It is regarded as the national epic of the Manipuris . It consists of approximately 39,000 verses . The epic poetry has fifteen chapters ( Meitei : Pandup ) and ninety two sections ( Meitei : Taangkak ). It

6256-490: The morals of the novels through plot descriptions of his stories. Books such as Breakfast of Champions and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater are sprinkled with these plot descriptions. Stanisław Lem 's Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius from The Cyberiad has several levels of storytelling. All levels tell stories of the same person, Trurl. House of Leaves is the tale of

6348-409: 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 ). Christie's work

6440-541: The mysterious V.F.D. organization, a key player in A Series of Unfortunate Events . This book sold 139,000 paperback copies in the United States in 2003. Karen Valby of Entertainment Weekly scored the book a B, saying, "...the whole thing is a bit of a vanity project, a bizarre exercise in style and trickery, but it will whet the appetites of fans as they wait for the ninth book. Newcomers, though, should start with The Bad Beginning ". Story within

6532-411: 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. Often the stories within a story are used to satirize views, not only in the outer story, but also in the real world. When a story is told within another instead of being told as part of the plot, it allows the author to play on the reader's perceptions of

6624-517: The performance of all or part of the play, as in Noises Off , A Chorus of Disapproval or Lilies . Similarly, the musical Man of La Mancha presents the story of Don Quixote as an impromptu play staged in prison by Quixote ' s author, Miguel de Cervantes . Indian epics Divisions Sama vedic Yajur vedic Atharva vedic Vaishnava puranas Shaiva puranas Shakta puranas Indian epic poetry

6716-452: The play broadly mirror those of the novel and give the character Oedipa Maas a greater context to consider her predicament; the play concerns a feud between two rival mail distribution companies, which appears to be ongoing 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,

6808-416: 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 medieval 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. Alternatively, a play might be about the production of a play, and include

6900-535: The play is presented before an audience of two of the characters, who comment upon the action. 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. William Shakespeare 's Hamlet retains this device by having Hamlet ask some strolling players to perform The Murder of Gonzago . The action and characters in The Murder mirror

6992-506: The preferred form of Hindu literary works. Indian culture readily lent itself to a literary tradition that abounded in epic poetry and literature. The Puranas , a massive collection of verse-form histories of India's many Hindu gods and goddesses, followed in this tradition. Itihāsa and Puranas are mentioned in the Atharva Veda and referred to as the fourth Veda . The language of these texts, termed Epic Sanskrit , constitutes

7084-423: The protagonist Mace Windu narrates the story within his journal, while the main story is being told from the third-person limited point of view. 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

7176-456: 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. Mahabharata , an Indian epic that

7268-486: The status of an epic. The narrative of Kamayani is based on a popular mythological story, first mentioned in Satapatha Brahmana . It is a story of the great flood and the central characters of the epic poem are Manu (a male) and Shraddha (a female). Manu is representative of the human psyche and Shradha represents love. Another female character is Ida , who represents rationality. Some critics surmise that

7360-420: The stories of their predecessors in a manner that validates a belief stated in the sixth tale that "Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present and by each crime, and every kindness, we birth our future." 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

7452-459: 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 Miguel de 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). Most of the first part

7544-536: The subject of an epic puppet theater presentation. 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. Plays produced by the "Caws of Art" theater company also feature in Russell Hoban's modern fable, The Mouse and His Child . Raina Telgemeier 's best-selling Drama

7636-471: The three lead characters of Kamayani symbolize a synthesis of knowledge, action and desires in human life. It inspires humans to live a life based on "karm" and not on fortunes. Apart from Kamayani , Saketa (1932) by Maithili Sharan Gupt , Kurukshetra (Epic Poetry) (1946), Rashmirathi (1952) and Urvashi (1961) by Ramdhari Singh 'Dinkar' have attained the status of epic poetry . Likewise Lalita Ke Aansoo by Krant M. L. Verma (1978) narrates

7728-612: The titular character. The most notable examples are " You Are Old, Father William ", " 'Tis the Voice of the Lobster ", " Jabberwocky ", and " The Walrus and the Carpenter ". Chaucer 's The Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio 's Decameron are also classic frame stories. In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales , the characters tell tales suited to their personalities and tell them in ways that highlight their personalities. The noble knight tells

7820-475: The tragic story about the death of Lal Bahadur Shastri through his wife Lalita Shastri . Kannada epic poetry mainly consists of Jain religious literature and Lingayat literature. Asaga wrote Vardhaman Charitra , an epic which runs in 18 cantos , in 853 CE, the first Sanskrit biography of the 24th and last tirthankara of Jainism, Mahavira , though his Kannada-language version of Kalidasa's epic poem, Kumārasambhava , Karnataka Kumarasambhava Kavya

7912-443: The two shining suns in the sky, to create the night . The Ougri is the collection of musical epic poetries, associated with religious themes, originated during the reign of King Nongda Lairen Pakhangba in 33 AD. Other epics include Shingel Indu by Hijam Anganghal, Khongjom Tirtha by Nilabir Sharma, Chingoi Baruni by Gokul Shastri, Kansa Vadha by A. Dorendrajit, and Vasudeva Mahakavya by Chingangbam Kalachand. However,

8004-429: The veracity of the previous layer, or is challenged by the succeeding layer. 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

8096-420: 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 ) and is often dropped in modern productions. The musical Kiss Me, Kate

8188-462: 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

8280-600: The world – a victory which itself is quite different from real history. In Red Orc's Rage by Philip J. Farmer a doubly recursive method is used to intertwine 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,

8372-651: Was parodied in Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound , in which two theater critics are drawn into the murder mystery they are watching. The audience is similarly absorbed into the action in Woody Allen's play God , which is about two failed playwrights in Ancient Greece. The phrase The Conscience of the King also became the title of a Star Trek episode featuring a production of Hamlet which leads to

8464-532: Was the first writer in prose style. His work Vaddaradhane is dated to 900 CE. Sri Ponna (939-966 CE) is also an important writer from the same period, with Shanti Purana as his magnum opus. Another major writer of the period is Ranna (949-? CE). His most famous works are the Jain religious work Ajita Tirthankara Purana and the Gada Yuddha , a birds' eye view of the Mahabharata set in

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