| This study examines eight novels and three plays written in the twentieth century in which an inner story is contained by an outer one, in order to show how the story within a story device functions in these works. The novels and plays were chosen because they demonstrate the extraordinary possibilities of the device. In each novel or play, the interplay of two or more substantial and distinct narratives provides a key to understanding the literary work as a whole. Writers turn to the story within a story because (1) it accommodates literary self-examination, (2) it serves as a medium for exploring connections between reality and illusion, and (3) it can encompass the moern sense of fragmentation and incoherence.;The first chapter explains how John Barth in Lost in the Funhouse and Doris Lessing in The Golden Notebook employ the technique to explore the problem of capturing life in literary art. The solution lies in the Moebius strip structure which unifies outer and inner narratives, and thus art and life. The second chapter discusses novels in which a reader in the outer story reads an inner story. Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler presents reading as a sensual and emotional experience. John Gardner's October Light highlights the moral aspect of reading by depicting a reader who is influenced by an immoral inner story. The White Hotel and Pale Fire focus on reading as interpretation; they lead us to compare our impressions of an inner story with those of the professional critics in the outer story. The third chapter deals with Pirandello's Six Characters and Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Real Inspector Hound. In these plays "detached characters" allow the playwrights to examine the interaction of illusion and reality in drama. The final chapter, on O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds and Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew, shows how the story within a story can be used to insist on the artifice of fiction by relentlessly exposing the conventions of realism. |
