A narrative technique where a story is presented within another story, providing context, commentary, or a reason for the telling.
A Framing Device creates a story within a story, where the main narrative is presented as being told by a character within the larger narrative. The most famous example is The Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights), where Scheherazade tells stories to the king each night to avoid execution. Her stories become the vehicle for her survival. Other examples include the frame narrative of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (pilgrims telling stories on their journey), the Frame Story of the epic Mahabharata (where the main epic is told within a larger gathering of sages), and many modern films that use framing (The Princess Bride, where a grandfather reads a story to his grandson). In folklore studies, framing devices serve important functions: they establish why stories are being told, provide commentary on the tales, create suspense (will Scheherazade survive another night?), and connect otherwise disparate stories through a common thread.