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Use Of Frame Narrative In The Canterbury Tales

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A frame narrative is a literary technique used to contain an embedded narrative, a story within a story. Frame narratives include a character starts telling a story to other characters or the character sits down to write a story, telling the details to the audience. Popular works that include a frame narrative include: Heart of Darkness and The Canterbury Tales. Both works include a frame story; which are characters telling a story on a journey. While there are numerous ways to portray a frame narrative, they all provide the reader with context about the main narrative. Each story contains a journey, for which people travel on long journeys. On these long journeys the characters have to entertain themselves; so their storytelling to one another provides framework for each story. …show more content…

This pilgrimage frame story brings together a number of storytellers, who appear with vibrant personality traits, and build up intense relationships with one another and with the tales they tell. Chaucer uses himself as a character in the frame story: on his pilgrimage to Canterbury, “The holy blisful martir for to seke”, he meets “Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye. / Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle” and is invited to travel with them. So this is the device that Chaucer uses to draw together the tales that he ascribes to various pilgrims. The “frame story” has little development following the General Prologue, which sets up the framework and introduces the pilgrims - we do not hear of their travels, and there is no clear order to the tales (although the Knight’s Tale is the first to be told, and there are some links between tales in the Prologues of, for example, the Miller’s Tale and the Pardoner’s

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