Ovid, Giovanni Boccaccio, and the authors of One Thousand and One Nights use frame narratives to add continuity and structure to the literary composition. Framing serves several literary functions. For one, framing establishes an independent narrator. The reader comes to trust and relate to this narrator, who is fictional and yet not quite a character of any of the internal narratives. This also allows the authors of their respective stories to remain independent, while still offering a "voice," broad omniscient analysis, or general commentary on the work contained therein. The narrator can therefore be viewed as a surrogate for the author's voice in an attempt to remain external to the work. The frame narrative therefore has a critical role to play in the evolution of fiction, novels, and narrative.

A second important literary function of framing is that it allows the author to string together otherwise disparate stories, linking them...
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