 As its name suggests, a frame story is a narrative that frames or surrounds another story or set of stories. It usually appears at the beginning and the end of a larger story and provides important context and key information on how to read it. Here's a simple example. Let's say you wake up one morning and reach for your phone to check Facebook. As you scroll through the feed, you notice a news story that your uncle has posted. Read this sheeple he's written in all caps. Slowly roll your eyes at your uncle's weird reposts, but you have some time to kill, so you click on the story and discover what appears to be a scientific article entitled The Hidden Dangers of Apple Juice, published by a site called Pairedown News. According to the article, apple juice not only causes cancer, it also probably contains rabies passed on by fruit bats. If you want all the taste of apple juice without all the rabies side effects, the article concludes you should start drinking pear juice. This conclusion seems more than a bit suspicious, so you do some quick googling and find out that Pairedown News is financed by something called Freedom Pairs of America, a marketing team for pear juice manufacturers that your uncle coincidentally works for. This revelation makes you rethink what you've just read and you decide to do a bit more research before you give up on apple juice for good. This story isn't of course real, don't have me, pear mafia, but it does illustrate the ways in which paying attention to the frames surrounding a story can help us to rethink the content of the story. In this fictional scenario, the story of the toxic apple juice seems designed to motivate its audience to buy more pear juice. We read it in a very different way with this knowledge in mind. Like your uncle's Facebook posts, most of the time the stories that we encounter are frameless or minimally framed, and we therefore have to do some research to re-establish the context out of which they're produced. But every so often we read stories that build a frame narrative into the story itself. Instead of jumping right into the tale to be told, these narratives pause for a moment to reveal the person who tells the tale, the people who listen to it, and the occasion for telling it. You've probably read a novel or watched a movie that begins in this way. Maybe you read the collection 1001 Nights, and learned in the frame story that the storyteller, Shahrazad, has just married a king, Shaiyar. You would also have learned that after his first wife betrays him, Shaiyar's jealousy and rage leads him to kill his wives the morning after their wedding night. To avoid this fate, Shahrazad must tell him a new story every night, and that story must be so interesting that he cannot help but spare her life for another day. Or maybe you've watched the movie The Princess Bride. That movie, as you may recall, begins with a curmudgeonly grandfather trying to convince his sick grandson to give up his TV and his video games to listen to a story that's also called The Princess Bride. As he tells his grandson, he used to read the same story to the boy's father when he was young. It doesn't sound too bad, the grandson tells him. I'll try and stay awake. These stories are obviously very different from one another. The grandson won't execute his grandfather if the story bores him. But they're both subject to a simple set of questions that you can and should always ask when reading frame narratives. Why is the story being told? What appeals does the story make to its implied audience of listeners? And how do the main story's themes relate to the themes of the frame story? Sometimes answers to the first question are fairly obvious. Sheha Razan, for example, tells her 1001 tales to keep her husband's interest and prevent him from executing her every morning of her marriage. But other times, determining the narrator's motivations and the relationship between the frame story and the main story require a bit of thought. Consider the grandfather in Princess Bride. He wants to show his love for his grandson and to have that love reciprocated. With this in mind, we might understand certain aspects of the story he tells him, say Inigo Montoya's love for his murdered father, as an attempt to foster a similar kind of intergenerational love. When Inigo tells the six-figured man, my name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die, the narrator's also telling his grandson, my name is your grandfather, I read to your father, prepare to love me. As these questions make clear, when we answer the first question, why is the story being told, our interpretations begin to open up, and we can ask more questions about the stories that the frame contains, starting with the second question, what appeals does the story make to its implied audience? In the case of 1001 Nights, for example, we could ask how Sheha Razan's selection of stories are meant to entertain her husband and what lessons she hopes they will convey to him. Sheha Razan's husband is clearly a fairly restless and agitated man, certainly not someone that you'd want to marry, which makes it all the more appealing to her audience that her stories are full of restless heroes, like Sinbad the Sailor. At the start of his second voyage, for example, Sinbad tells his listener, a poor porter who is also named Sinbad, something that might also appeal to Sheha Yar. I'd resolved, as you know, on my return for my first voyage to spend the rest of my days quietly in Baghdad, but very soon I grew tired of such an idle life and longed once more to find myself upon the sea. He echoes this sentiment at the start of all seven of his voyages abroad, and this quest for novelty establishes a thematic relationship between the frame story and Sinbad's adventures. Clearly Sheha Razan needs her character Sinbad to be restless so she can keep telling her stories. She just want to run out of material and be killed, but at the same time, she probably does not want her husband to fully identify with Sinbad's wandering ways. After all, he might then kill her and set off on another marriage voyage. Sheha Razan resolves these problems at the end of Sinbad's seventh adventure, when she has the restless adventure finally agreed to settle down for good with his friend and family. In his final lines, he asks the porter, well, my friend, and what do you think now? Have you ever heard of anyone who has suffered more or had more narrow escapes than I have? Is it not just that I should now enjoy a life of ease and tranquility? With the frame story in mind, we might recognize that these questions are equally appropriate for Sheha Razan. She has, after all, also narrowly escaped death every night of her buried life, and should now, at long last, enjoy a life of ease and tranquility. These readings that I've just given for 1001 Nights and The Princess Bride were both generated by the same questions. Why is the story being told? What appeals does the story make to its implied audience? How does the main story's themes relate to the themes of the frame story? If you keep these three questions in mind, you'll have a good sense of how to start reading any other frame story that you encounter in your literary adventures. And who knows? You may even have a better sense of how to read your uncle's Facebook posts.