frame story

American  

noun

1. a secondary story or stories embedded in the main story.

2. a narrative providing the framework for connecting a series of otherwise unrelated stories.

3. a literary device that uses such a narrative structure.

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Example Sentences

As a longtime storyteller, he also savored the primacy of narrative within the stories — particularly the frame story.

From New York Times

The metafictional frame story of the novel is very different from the movie; it’s about a screenwriter, his failing marriage and his distant son.

From Washington Post

There is no such frame story in the stage musical, where the audience to Usnavi’s tale is, well, the audience, and there’s no epilogue involving Vanessa and Usnavi’s daughter.

From Slate

The author also deftly deploys the frame story, putting the present narrative in conversation with the violent events of Sitwell’s childhood in the American South.

From Washington Post

Screenwriter Taylor has taken a particular scene from Vance’s memoir—a fish-out-of-water dinner with law firms offering summer employment, complete with his confusion over varieties of forks and types of white wine—and turned it into a frame story which is then filled out with flashbacks.

From Slate