Narrative layering
A narrative structure in which an exterior frame (a storyteller, a setting, a framing situation) contains and contextualises an interior story, creating multiple distinct levels of narration. The relationship between the outer frame and the inner story does analytical work: the frame can recontextualise, contradict, or reinforce what the interior story tells. Distinct from non-chronological narrative, which concerns temporal arrangement, and from dramatic monologue, which concerns a single narrator's address. Narrative layering is specifically about the architectural relationship between two or more narrative levels.
Creates multiple levels of storytelling that allow the song to comment on its own narrative - who is telling the story, under what conditions, and to whom. The relationship between frame and interior story carries meaning: the listener has to read what each level reveals about the other, and the gap between them is often where the song's argument sits.
Appears in 1 song
Angela & Uncle Jerry identify the song as operating on two metafictional levels of storytelling, drawn from the frame-tale structure of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Uncle Jerry names the technique explicitly: 'the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by the way, is what we call a frame tale. So a frame tale is a story that has an exterior frame and then an interior story.' The outer frame, the wise men's narrative about the speaker, contains the interior story of the speaker's actual relationship with the addressee. The reversal at verse three is the moment the interior story breaks through the framing narrative.
The layered narrative structure is the mechanism through which the song's argument about repudiation and redemption operates. By placing the wise men's framing of her story in dialogue with her own counter-narrative, the song foregrounds the gap between how she is characterised by others and how she actually is, the same architectural move Coleridge uses to set the mariner's tale against the wedding guest's reception of it.