Framing is accomplished by beginning a narrative with comments about a story from outside the story itself, perhaps introducing a fictional narrator or a situation in which the story was first told. A story which begins in this way typically ends with a return to the situation or the supposed original narrator, thus framing the narrative. This may have the effect of alluding to the oral tradition of storytelling and may also give an impression of authenticity.
Owen Marshall employs framing devices in some of his short stories. The Triumph of History, for example begins:
This is my uncle’s story but he’s dead now. He told it in various ways over the years, and when he was too old and sick to remember it, I sometimes told it to him, to pass the time as we sat in his untidy sunporch on my visits there.
The final paragraph again refers to the uncle.
My uncle said he and the others at the hotel heard shots and howling within twenty minutes… My uncle said it was a tableau that never left him…
How it Goes begins with, “Picture this if you will..” and goes on to describe the setting of the story. Not a framing device as such but the narrator begins from outside the story and addresses the reader, indeed directs the reader, with an imperative sentence. The story ends similarly:
Picture him asleep in the small, plain bedroom of the farmhouse, with the moonlight through the window forming a pale blank screen on the wall, as if some film is about to start and tell us more about his life.
The narrative technique of addressing the reader was commonly employed in early English novels of the eighteenth century, either directly, in the second person: Dear reader…, or indirectly in the third person, as for example by Henry Fielding in The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling:
The reader, from what hath been said, may imagine that…
My reader then is not to be surprized, if, in the course of this work, he shall find…
My reader may please to remember he hath been informed that…
The reader may perhaps wonder at hearing nothing of Mr Jones in the last chapter…